The Best Leadership Uses the Least Force

Jocko Willink is a retired U.S. Navy SEAL, co-author of *Extreme Ownership*, *The Dichotomy of Leadership*, and *Discipline Equals Freedom*, and host of Jocko Podcast. He spent twenty years in the SEAL teams and commanded SEAL Team 3's Task Unit Bruiser, which became the most highly decorated special operations unit of the Iraq War. Lex Fridman opens with a question that is not small talk: is it tragic or beautiful that some of the closest human bonds are formed through war?

Willink's answer is immediate. It is both, for the obvious reasons. It is tragic because a lot of people die. It is beautiful because you form bonds that are very difficult to break once you have been through that together. What the trauma of war does, he says, is make the dependence visible. The people next to you are relying on you to survive, and without them you will not survive. When you realize you have to work as a team in order to live, the bond is no longer optional.

He does not mystify the mechanism. He has not lived every kind of life, and he will not pretend war is the only forge. Survival scenarios and other atrocities, anywhere people must work together in order to live, can produce something similar. War is simply the most extreme version of a pressure that welds people together.

Fridman, born in the Soviet Union, argues that World War II did more than shape Russian lives. It created culture: music, poetry, literature, and even the way people still talk. He is less interested in two soldiers in a trench than in the reverberations generations later, a preference for depth of connection over the transactional networking of careers. Willink answers with the actual production line the military uses to manufacture that depth.

Civilians enter boot camp, get yelled at, get put in the mud, and do hard things together. That common suffering is the first bond. Advanced infantry school tightens it and shrinks the group to people who will actually fight. Airborne school adds a shared fear and a shared celebration of having survived the jump. Special Forces or Ranger training raises the intensity again; not everyone makes it, so the ones who remain also share the memory of the people who did not. Combat is the last multiplier. Units that go through combat get tighter, and the harder the combat, the tighter the bond.

Scale that chain to a nation and the Soviet experience becomes legible. The entire country went through a shared suffering to survive, so the entire nation has that common thread. That, Willink thinks, is what Fridman still feels when he looks back at World War II. Fridman's grandfather was a machine gunner in Ukraine as the Germans marched on Moscow in 1941. Stalin threw bodies at the advance; heavy machine guns were barely mobile, men were placed at the front, and more than 95 percent died. Twice as many civilians died as military personnel. Fridman says it felt less like conflict than like torture, even though the volunteers were proud to march toward death for country.

Willink does not soften the numbers. A soldier dying is awful, a civilian dying is awful, and millions dying is worse. The Soviet Union, he says, faced an existential threat from the Nazis. To not fight was also to die, a few years later, on your knees. The choice was clear. The tactic has a colder name than "throwing bodies": attrition warfare. Whoever has more men and material eventually wins. It is an awful way to fight. It was the strategy.

Fridman asks about failures of leadership: Hitler's early boldness, Stalin's blindness, Britain's delay before Churchill, America's wish to keep its own interests first. Willink's reading of Hitler is simple. Early in the war he listened to his generals, and they did pretty well. Later he believed he was smarter than he was and made decisions that cost him dearly. Attacking the Soviet Union while still fighting on another front is the exhibit. Success at blitzkrieg fueled the ego that then outran his capabilities.

What makes a war just? Nazis and Imperial Japan trying to impose their will on other nations, Willink says, and on a grand scale people look at that and believe it is just to step in. Then Fridman asks about the gray area. There is nothing but gray area, Willink replies. The United States has been in a lot of military conflicts since then. The line is not a slogan. You look at the situation you are walking into, and you make sure you have the will to go to war.

The will to go to war means you are willing to kill people, and not only the enemy. Civilians are going to die. Women and children are going to die. You are going to kill them. Smart munitions and disciplined soldiers do not change that. Your own troops are going to die too. Willink thinks countries are often naive about that calculation, telling themselves not that many civilians and not that many of their own people will be lost. That is how you get into sticky situations. Soviet Union versus the Nazis was total war: do absolutely anything to win. America, he says, does not fight like that very often. The last time was World War II, up to and including the atomic bomb.

Fridman presses on ethics. Even the atomic bomb had critics inside the United States; soldiers execute, leaders decide. Does blame belong with leaders who fail the moral calculation, in Vietnam or in Iraq? Willink's answer is not a defense of infallibility. Leaders are going to make mistakes. It is impossible to know what will happen in war, just as it is impossible to know what will happen in life. You decide on the information you have. Where he has a more significant problem is the leader who will not admit the mistake. Ownership of the form "this intelligence was not what I thought, here is the new direction" is globally scarce. When you refuse to say it, you end up with more loss of human life.

Fridman asks what it feels like to kill a human being. Willink will not give one answer. Someone who kills in a fit of rage comes out of it and thinks they have really messed up. A sociopath feels nothing. A soldier trying to protect friends will move through it. A soldier chasing personal glory will probably not feel good about it later. Situation and psychology decide. Governments try to make that easier by dehumanizing the other side. The Japanese dehumanized Americans and Americans dehumanized Japanese and Nazis, he says, to remove as much of the human-on-human aspect as they could.

In Iraq, Willink says, his unit did not have to do that extra work. The enemy dehumanized themselves through torture, rape, and murder of the local populace. He did not look at them as people on the level of an uncle or a brother. He thought of them as murdering, raping, evil sub-humans. At the same time the Iraqi civilians became highly humanized: interpreters, the same faces day after day, a bond with the people living under that terror. The contrast made the moral picture, for him, not difficult.

Fridman's fear is a larger kind of othering. He hears drums of war with China, starting in cybersecurity and sliding toward "they are the other." That path, he worries, can end in camps, starvation, or a hot war of kids slaughtering kids, closer to the Soviet-German slaughter than to Iraq. He quotes Dire Straits: "We're fools to make war on our brothers in arms." Willink first takes the lyric literally. Brothers in arms means the people on your side; it does not make sense to start wars with them. Broadly, is war foolish? Yes. If you can avoid it, you absolutely should.

Then the other half of the sentence. If a bear or a wolf is trying to get into your house, is it foolish to shoot it? When you, your family, or your way of life is threatened, you have to do something to defend them. It should be the last resort. He says that twice, without ornament. War is foolish and should be avoided, and the world does not always run on your preference.

Jordan Peterson once asked Willink whether he would like his children to grow up in a time of no war. Willink said yes, but, and Peterson did not let him finish. The rest of the sentence sits in this conversation. Struggle brings people together and brings out the best and the worst. Would you want your kid in a wrestling tournament where you paid off the other children, or in a jiu jitsu tournament as a purple belt against white belts, so they get the win without the test? If you do not struggle, you do not grow. That is the but.

The absolute best times of his life were in combat, and the worst times of his life were in combat. He would not want any of his children to suffer through the worst. The rest of the but is that he would want them to have the opportunity to feel that bond, and to see human beings willing to sacrifice their lives for their friends. Asked what was hardest in Iraq, he does not reach for absurd cruelty as a category. What hurts is losing people close to you. There are a million ways to get killed. You can do everything wrong and survive, or do everything perfect and die. If mistakes were made, you will beat yourself up eternally. The thing that hurts is still the loss.

Is he afraid of death? No. He knows it will end. He knows he is lucky to be here because many people sacrificed for that chance, and he does not dwell on it. In combat, tactics, strategy, and the mission are on the board; his own mortality is not part of the calculation. You accept that you can roll out the gate, hit a triple-stack subsurface IED, and be done, and nothing will stop it. If you are scared of that or thinking about it, it inhibits the job and drives you crazy. What he thought about more was that happening to his guys. That is the gut-wrenching terror of an operation.

Fridman is still puzzled by love of country: so many people loved Stalin and were willing to die for the state, and yet patriotism also produces the Olympics, a step out of one ant's selfishness into the colony. Willink's frame is the same one he uses for almost everything. Balanced correctly, it is great. Taken to an extreme, it becomes a negative. The source is tribalism. A nation is a very big tribe you get to join just by showing up. Someone says we are going to play hockey against the Russians, and you cheer for the American boys. That erasure of private calculation is inspiring, which is also why it is so easy to use for harm.

Fridman's own field is artificial intelligence, and he wants Willink's view of autonomous weapon systems. The United States has said it will add more autonomy and AI because China is doing it. Best case, machines make more surgical attacks and kill fewer civilians and fewer of your own. Worst case, you strip out the soldier's sense of right and wrong and one mistake hurts thousands or millions. Would Willink support a machine that could do more surgical attacks on enemy individuals? Yes. The problem, he adds, is that machines have unintended consequences and bugs. You put protocols in place so they do not go too far outside the boundaries.

Fridman is not comforted. This is the first time you can build a machine smarter than you at a particular task. Rely on it and you get lazy, lose the intricacies, and forget the ways things go wrong. Protocols may not hold when events move fast and the two sides do not share ethics. He is more worried that Willink, like many generals, does not worry. Willink is frank about why. Fridman can see the shortfalls of AI; he cannot. As far as he is concerned, you put an on-off switch on the system, and if it goes awry you hit it. Draw the line together if someone can show that no kill switch is 100 percent effective.

Fridman still puts the failure mode on the human supervisor who does not hit the switch in time, as at Chernobyl. Willink agrees that responsibility belongs in human hands: good protocols, good leadership, competency, multiple people supervising, protocols that assume human nature will fail. He is skeptical of giving machines greater and greater power to create war. His analogy is nuclear weapons. They have sat on the planet for years without a rogue launch, and protocols have worked so far. He admits that relying on those protocols to stop someone from killing millions is a scary thing to think about. The protocols should be strict.

If human civilization goes extinct, what would be the reason? Fridman lists nuclear war, bioengineered viruses, and artificial general intelligence, and points to a four-hour Sam Harris podcast on engineered pathogens. Willink is sorry to disappoint again with his lack of worry. The species has made it through a bunch of wickets and will make it through some more, or it will not. If someone decides over the weekend to create a virus that kills everybody, then that is what happens. His deeper bet is that most people have much more capacity for good than for evil, and that humans are resilient and innovative, responding better as the scale of tragedy grows. Fridman says he is extremely optimistic too, except if we do not make it through.

What makes a great human being? Someone who puts others above themselves. What makes a great leader of humans? The same sentence, doing much more work. A leader faces egos, tension, timid people, assholes, and people who are incredibly competent and self-obsessed. How do you get all of them to be a better version of themselves and lift everyone else? Willink reaches for a video-game character sheet he does not actually play. Strength, intelligence, speed: humans and leaders are ratings mixed together. An introvert who communicates in a clear, simple way can still be followed. A charismatic person who cannot make a decision when a decision is needed is still not a good leader. There is no template, only how the mix performs.

Fridman offers Elon Musk as a case study, with the caveat that Willink may have no familiarization and will be working from the briefing. Musk is harsh, holds a very high bar, and asks first-principles questions that hurt: why are we doing it this way, and why can it not be a lot better? Harshness, Willink says, can be horrible. There are harsh leaders who are hated, whom no one wants to work for, who never do anything. What made Willink's own blunt-force feedback usable with young SEALs who had made mistakes in training was that those men knew without one shred of doubt that he cared about them more than anything else. He wanted them to lead their troops, accomplish the mission, and bring their guys home. He was not being harsh to elevate his ego or to denigrate them.

If Musk's harshness comes from "we have to make this happen, this is for the good of the world," and people know that, then it works. The other Musk trait Fridman admires is time on the factory floor: sleeping in the middle of the problem, talking to the person putting parts together, understanding materials and mechanical details instead of stopping at a manager. Willink says good leaders go down to the front-line troops and ask what the issue is and how they can help. The important detail in Fridman's account is *when there is a problem*. Subsystems that are working get a check-in. Emergencies get the leader in the dirt.

That is altitude. After eight hours of staring at maps, someone walking in from a distance can see holes you cannot see because you are too close. Sometimes the distant view is not enough, and you have to dig until you find a route that actually makes sense. Then you go back up. The reason Musk can scale, if the briefing is right, is that he does not get stuck down there. If every Tesla part had to be micromanaged, the company would be unlikely. He can hand over a broad chip function to a team and return to the strategic level. That is what leaders should do: elevate, get into the weeds when they have to, and go back up.

The cost of that style, Fridman says, is a life of emergencies that can wreck a production line. Musk has said he worries whether his mind can hold up much longer. Willink's advice is decentralized command. Build subordinate leaders you fully trust and, most important, have properly trained, so they handle at least 80 percent of the day-to-day fires and only 20 percent need the principal. If that is not happening, it is going to end up being a problem. Every hour a leader spends looking down and into the organization is an hour not spent looking up and out at competitors and the market.

Startups force a long stretch of looking down and in; you do not yet have the money for manpower. Willink wonders whether Musk is habitually in the weeds because he has done so many startups. The prescription is the same: formulate subordinate leadership with the expertise and trust to take minute details so the founder can survive a little longer and look outward. Fridman notes the pattern is more successful at SpaceX, where many people credit CEO Gwynne Shotwell, than at Tesla. He also worries that if Musk disappears, the innovative spirit collapses.

That, Willink says, is a culture problem. If a founder's ego loves being the creative force and tells people to stay in their box, the company will not know how to keep creating after he dies. You have to encourage a culture where creativity is rewarded and can flourish when he is gone. Fridman is not sure there are many people like Musk. Success makes most people soft; Musk seems to get the reverse effect, always hunting the next 10x. Willink's answer is that you do not only create a culture. You create a culture with the right people.

Steve Jobs, in Fridman's briefing, is harsher than Musk in a different way. He lost his temper, let passion dominate, fired people, and said mean things, especially early on. How often is a leader allowed to lose their shit for love of the work? You should not be doing that very often, Willink says. Apple's success does not refute the point. Jobs was off the charts at design and at human interface with computers, so far off the charts that the company still thrived despite the temper. You can have a horrible leader who builds something so universally outstanding that the company succeeds anyway.

When people cite Jobs at him, Willink asks whether they are as good at design and marketing as Jobs was. Those skills let Jobs succeed *despite* treating people horribly, not because of it. The company would have been even more successful without those characteristics. The test he prefers is simple. Which team wins: the one that executes because it is afraid of the leader, or the one that loves the leader so much it does not want to let them down? He has seen countless times that leading through rank, authority, and punitive measures is infinitely worse than working together as a team to win.

Jobs's other doctrine is A-players: a single B-player destroys the productivity of the group. Willink wants to know what kind of B-player. Lazy? No vision? A giant ego that creates conflict? A grinder who is not the smartest person in the room but is committed to the team is someone he wants. A team is complementary components, and complementary parts can beat a roster built only on "level." In the SEAL teams, a stacked platoon, assembled by a senior person maneuvering to collect the most experienced names, was sometimes great and sometimes imploded. A room full of A-players, nobody willing to follow, everybody insisting on their way, is a problem. One person can derail a team. Under good leadership, one person should not.

Ego is the engine and the wreck. Willink uses Fridman's marathon image. Two people with massive egos, last hundred meters, both wanting to win so badly they give everything: that is totally positive. Same race, same egos, and one runner is so unwilling to lose that a knee "accidentally" clips the other onto their face: that is ego in control of the decision. Someone can be tens across the board and still unusable if they cannot accept anyone else's ideas. A good leader isolates that person, gives them a hard piece of the project to grind on alone, takes the result, and disseminates it. You use the excellence. You do not let the ego wreck the team.

Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet, is Fridman's opposite case. Everybody loves him. He is a great listener. The energy he brings into a room is that he wants to hear all the voices, almost as if he does not want to impose a final decision and the decision falls out. Fridman credits that love with bringing out people's best at Google, and also worries that a kind listener cannot cut through bureaucracy the way a dictator can. Willink's first move is the dichotomy. Thinking you can bark orders every time and always get the best result is not smart. Thinking every decision will reveal itself at 100 percent consensus, with no nudge, is short-sighted and naive.

A good leader stays balanced, listens, and maybe quietly nudges in ways no one even picks up on. Willink's preferred line is that the best form of leadership is leadership with the minimum force required. If he can walk into a room, not say one single thing, and the team comes to the right consensus, that is the preferred method. A 10 percent nudge is better than a 100 percent dictatorial direction. In an emergency, when people are frazzled, you walk in and say here is where we are going. They get on board because for months or years you trusted them to come up with plans. When you trust the team, the team starts to trust you. That deposit is leadership capital. Occasionally you cash some of it: here is the direction, we will debrief later, we have to move. The team that trusts you says roger that.

Giving someone a job their resume does not support, Fridman has noticed, often makes them step up. Willink is not surprised. One of the best tools for teaching leadership is leadership itself. Elevate someone and they often make things happen. You still mitigate risk. Putting a civilian with limited weapons experience in charge of a real target assault is a bad move. Putting them in charge of a paintball training mission is fine. Joe Rogan hiring Jamie with almost no information, and Jamie becoming one of the best podcast producers in the world, sits in that pattern. What Fridman likes in Jamie is relentless self-criticism, an anxious energy that things are not good enough.

That is not ridiculous to Willink. The characteristic he would have named first, if the questions had not boxed it out, is humility. When you hire, look for someone who can say they could have done this better. A person who thinks they know everything is hard to coach. With a humble producer, you barely apply force: after the show they already know what they set up late. With a big ego you expend leadership capital just to get improvements, which is what you are always trying to conserve. This does not mean hiring people with no confidence. It is the dichotomy of leadership. People who reach leadership already have confidence; the tendency is for confidence to outweigh humility. Really good leaders are confident and humble.

What does a disciplined life look like? Doing what you are supposed to do. Lying on the couch eating Cheetos is not it, and it is not fulfilling. Fridman brings up Jordan Peterson's "make your bed." Willink does not make his bed. When he was younger he had one sleeping bag and there was nothing to make. Now he is married, and his wife is in the bed. The publicly facing ritual is the other one: waking around 4:00 or 4:30 a.m. and posting a photo of the watch. The philosophy is getting a jump on the day. Workout done, a little work done, by the time normal people are getting up: a psychological win and an actual win. The alarm does not feel great. By 8:00 a.m., some of the most painful tasks are already finished, and the day feels great.

A perfect day, as he sketches it, is wake up, then work out alone from about 5:00 to 6:00 or 7:00. Jiu jitsu comes later. The solo session is whatever produces sweat: bodyweight, lifting, cardio, heavy bag. Sometimes twelve minutes, sometimes three hours, depending on mood. Fridman compares him to David Goggins, screaming demons out through motion. Willink will not pick up the diagnosis. Exercise is humbling and it is physical conditioning, preparing the body for whatever comes next. If the waves are good he surfs before work, because it is fun, not because it is a metaphor about man and the ocean. He usually starts grazing around 11:00, nuts, maybe a little meat, still light.

Work is writing, recording, reading, talking to clients. He reads in chunks of about an hour, perhaps twice a day. Writing for an hour yields about a thousand words. Around 4:30 or 5:00 p.m. he trains jiu jitsu with the same partners; he has been lucky with injuries. Dinner is steak and salad, dessert a protein shake. There is no samurai-sword meditation on death. He might read a little more because reading makes him tired, then he goes to bed. The key to a productive day is not a secret technique. Write down what you are supposed to do, wake up early, start doing it, and get it done.

Jiu jitsu, Willink says, was the connective tissue that joined the parts of his life. He does not think he would be doing any of what he does now without it. Interacting with other human beings, combat tactics, and strategy all follow the same guiding principles, and he would not have recognized them if he had not trained. Humility is the first transfer. There is always somebody better. A 145-pound person can tap a 220-pound twenty-five-year-old. You take that into a platoon and remember you do not have all the answers. You take it into combat so you do not sit there thinking you are smarter than the enemy, which is how you get complacent and make mistakes.

The tactics map is concrete. To get an arm, a white belt grabs the arm; you attack the neck so the hands come up. On the battlefield you do not frontal-assault a position; you put down covering fire and maneuver to the flank. If your boss has a giant ego and a plan you dislike, you do not walk up and say the plan is not good. You ask questions because you want to make sure you understand the vision. Competition reveals weaknesses your regular training partners will not, because they already know your game. His coach and main training partner for twenty-something years is Dean Lister, who has the most submission victories in ADCC and is always trying to submit. Point-fighting became novel to Willink only as jiu jitsu got popular. John Danaher and his students going out to submit people is, to him, what jiu jitsu is.

Advice for white belts is the advice everyone gives and almost no white belt takes for three to six months: keep training, keep your ego in check, do not freak out, use the techniques. They go nuts trying not to tap and trying to tap someone with strength, which inhibits learning. Get it out of your system, then relax and learn. One of his favorite coaching lines on the mat is "relax harder." For self-defense he starts with jiu jitsu, then boxing, wrestling, judo, sambo, Muay Thai. First self-defense is the feet: run. A street fight has almost nothing good in it and a million bad outcomes, including a knife or a lawsuit after you throw someone on concrete. The problem changes when someone grabs you. Then you need to break the grip, get off the ground, stand up, and run.

The book that most shaped him is *About Face* by Colonel David Hackworth, a soldier's soldier who came up at the end of World War II, then Korea, then Vietnam. Willink never met him; Hackworth died in 2005. He worried the glowing quotes in the book might be cherry-picked, the hero an arrogant jerk. General James Mukoyama, who had been a young captain under Hackworth, told him everybody knew who he was: Mr. Infantry. The troops adored him. Up the chain it was different. Near the end of Vietnam, disgusted with how the war was being fought, Hackworth became the first senior officer to speak out against it while still in country, and he was drummed out. Willink counts the cost. Quit or get fired and you immediately give up all influence. They put another colonel in, and you cannot help your troops anymore. Love made Hackworth speak. The ledger still matters. Asked what role love plays, Willink returns to putting other people above yourself. That, he agrees, is the implementation of love. Fridman closes with Willink's own line: there are no bad teams, only bad leaders.