MBS964- Damn Few: Making the Modern SEAL Warrior with Rorke Denver

In this episode, we bring you Rorke Denver. Commander Rorke T. Denver has run every phase of training for the U.S. Navy SEALs and led special-forces missions in the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and other international hot spots. He starred in the hit film Act of Valor, which is based on true SEAL adventures. His New York Times bestseller, Damn Few: Making the Modern SEAL Warrior, takes you inside his personal story and the fascinating, demanding SEAL training program. In his second book Worth Dying For: A Navy SEALs Call to a Nation, Rorke tackles the questions that have emerged about America’s past decade at war–from what makes a hero to why we fight and what it does to us. Rorke was most recently seen on FOX’s American Grit. The series followed 16 of the country’s toughest men and women as they faced a variety of military-grade and survival-themed challenges set in the wilderness.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Do we think that Crusader patches are gonna help us in that task of partnering with an Islamic fighting force? And everybody gets quiet. And I was like, hey, to be honest, can anybody name to me the century of which the first and second crusades launched? Crickets in the room. I said, Can anybody name the country from which we disembarked Europe or headed into the Middle Eastern territory to fight for Jerusalem and these lands? Crickets. I was like, look, so we can't go too seriously into the history of the Crusades and the Knights Templar, those that prosecuted these missions and go over there and create a good semblance of connection to our partner force over in Iraq. So those ideas died on the vine. And I was delighted because we actually deployed without a pet patch. And then I felt terrible. I'm like, what a jerk I am, man. I didn't even like help facilitate getting a new patch. Within about three weeks of being in country, our platoon, our team, was wearing the third Iraqi Brigade patch. We were wearing their combat patch. And now you're like, here we go, boys, we're doing it right.

SPEAKER_00 1:05

Hey there guys, so today we are joined by yet another commander from the U.S. Navy SEALs, and his name is Rourke Thomas Denver. Now, Rourke has run every phase of training for the U.S. Navy SEALs and led special forces missions in the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and other international hotspots. He starred in the hit form Act of Valor, which is based on two SEAL adventures. And his New York Times bestseller Damn Few Making the Modern SEAL Warrior, which we get into in this episode, takes you inside his personal story and the fascinating, demanding SEAL training programs. In his second book, Worth Dying for A Navy SEAL's Call to a Nation, Rourke tackles the questions that have emerged about America's past decade at war, from what makes a hero to why we fight and what it does to us. Rourke was most recently seen on Fox's American Grit Reality TV show, which featured John Cena, amongst others. The series followed sixteen of the country's toughest men and women as they faced a variety of military grade and survival themed challenges set in the wilderness. This guy is the real deal. He is part of a faculty that includes David Goggins, Jocko Willink, and Leif Bavin, who has been on the show. And pay careful attention, guys, to where we reveal the relationship to the Navy SEAL's ethos to modern-day business leaders like you. So without further ado, enter Rawke Denver. Hello, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome back to another live edition of the MapRound Show. Today we are joined by yet another heavyweight from the US Navy SEALs academy and uh culture. And we're going to get into all of that. But his name is Rawke Denver. Thanks so much for joining the show.

SPEAKER_01 2:49

Thank you, man. I appreciate it.

SPEAKER_00 2:51

So you're a New York Times best-selling author. You basically trained Navy SEALs for like four years, or you're the head of that whole program. And um and just what an incredible kind of true authentic story you're telling about uh you know the Navy SEALs brotherhood and um you know what we can learn as entrepreneurs and business leaders today. So super excited to get into this uh with you. Uh just some fundamentals before we start. Um we are broadcasting this live. If you would like to comment, you can there you go. Studio line is already going off. Uh so if you want to engage with Rourke directly, please just comment, send us a message. Uh the studio line number is up on the screen here. So please do get involved in the conversation. Cool, Rawke. Awesome. Um, why don't you give us the two-minute intro? Who are you? What are you about? What's your kind of claim to fame?

SPEAKER_01 3:46

Yeah, of course. No, I appreciate it. Uh, you know, grew up in the Bay Area of California, uh, right in the heart of Silicon Valley before it exploded in the tech bonanza. It's become, you know, is a normal place to grow up. I mean, you know, kind of normal, middle, upper class uh part of the world, athlete my entire life. Uh, definitely found more footing um in sports and kind of competitive, combative sports than I did the classroom. Although I love to read, I love to study. I just didn't like the four walls of uh of an organized classroom. Sports beautifully brought me to um the East Coast or the eastern states of the United States to play um lacrosse, which is uh you know big game out in the States, um, back at Syracuse University. Um as every you know tactical mission commander and officer studies. I was a fine arts major. So uh I loved art and literature and and history as opposed to math and science. And then my senior year, I really felt the calling um to serve. And so this was pre-9-11. I uh went to officer school, uh, straight out of college, went uh right to SEAL training, and then um uh completed a 20-year career uh in the SEAL teams. I did 13 active duty years, most of that through um 9-11 in the global war on terror with combat deployments to Iraq, Afghanistan, East and West Africa, uh, Central and South America pre-9-11, and then finished my time kind of running training both for the basic and advanced course of Navy SEALs, and now I do a lot of consulting on leadership, culture, high performance teams, and all that good stuff.

SPEAKER_00 5:13

Right. So we were talking about Leif Bevan and Jocko Willink um just before we went live. So you guys all know each other, right? I believe you served in the same yeah.

SPEAKER_01 5:23

Yeah, we were at the same SEAL team. So a lot of people think when you say team, it means the same kind of tactical element, which was not necessarily the case. We're all at um one of the West Coast SEAL teams at the same time. Jocko was in what's called a task unit leadership position with Leif and another one of our teammates that sadly uh uh passed on. Um they ran a tactical element, and then we were my team was kind of a sister tactical element um running operations in um Al-Anbar province of Iraq in 2006 and in kind of a a pretty, needless say, combat heavy and famous deployment now based on some of my writings, and then certainly uh Leif and Jocko did an amazing job of capturing um that time out in in Western Iraq and and how that relates to business and leadership and and high performance.

SPEAKER_00 6:08

Yeah, my dad actually spent seven years in Afghanistan with you with you guys on the ground there.

SPEAKER_01 6:13

Oh, is that right?

SPEAKER_00 6:14

Yeah, yeah, yeah. He um he's got two US flags. I don't know why. He never tells me the stories about why, but uh you can kind of connect the dots and make stuff up, right?

SPEAKER_02 6:25

Sure, sure, sure, sure.

SPEAKER_01 6:26

No, it's great.

SPEAKER_00 6:27

But uh yeah, it's uh what what an incredible um you know character you want you have to have in order to kind of pull that kind of stuff off and do it well. Um so let's kind of get into that because you know the SEALs have uh we're very familiar with Navy SEALs. I hear Hell Week all the time, but you know, uh it's you know, this stuff is the you guys are like becoming rock stars, right? So it's it's quite flattering. And so um one of the things that you one could make the case for is that or what's missing from the story is the how and the why. Do you understand? Like it's the the how week and all that is kind of like scratching the surface, right? In in some respects. Um, but can you walk us through the psychology uh behind the success of the SEALs? What do you put it down to?

SPEAKER_01 7:15

Yeah, I mean you you you hit the the real focal point of what's gonna lead to success within that training program, both basic advanced, and when you get to the uh the combat units, and it's what lives up here, not what what's you know in your in your body necessarily. I mean, everybody that shows up to SEAL training is fit. There's basic requirements to obviously get through the front door, but it really is what lives in between in your brain or in your heart, kind of your spirit, um, that's gonna take you the full distance. The fact of the matter is, um we've pretty much, I think if you ask anybody that ran the program or went through the program, would say it's easily 90, 10, 95, 5 mental to physical. We we put so much pressure, so much physical intensity on a young lion that wants to become part of this uh warrior culture that if you don't have, you know, a very resilient mind, a resilient focus on seeing uh a goal, being willing to achieve it, no matter what obstacle is put in front of your way, that program is not for you. And and it's very, very simple. I think people believe you'd show up at our SEAL training compound and there'd be guys repelling in on helicopters and laser retina scans to get in and top secret information and gear and technology. It's uh sand, concrete, and cold water. That's what we use. We use a tremendous amount of physical and mental suffering to give somebody an opportunity to basically prove they won't quit no matter what, or to give up and move on. And we don't look at that as a negative sincerely. We have about a 75 to 80 percent attrition rate over about 60 years of the program. So about 75 to 80 percent of the young lions that showed up don't see the finish line. And almost all of them leave of their own volition. We don't need to drop that many people from training from training. Most people at some point say, I've never been this cold, wet, and miserable in my life. You guys are crazy, I'm out of here. And they go ring this bell that we have. That's kind of our traditional way of ringing out or dropping, leaving the program. It's not to embarrass somebody, it's just this program is not for you, it's time to move on. That bell becomes kind of the soundtrack or this unbelievable um, you know, kind of almost marker for those that make it and stay that you're like, hey, I'm not ringing the bell. This is still for me. And so it really is that mental focus. I think resilience is um one of the true key factors of somebody that's gonna come to the program. It's the type of person. Um, I I have several stories, we could get into them if we want to get into it, but I think the person that recognizes you can do everything right and it can still go catastrophically wrong is perfectly designed for our program. And if you're the type of person where you do everything perfectly right in training and then it goes wrong, you're like, oh, this is unfair, this is BS, I'm gonna quit. You wouldn't want our job because we're the type of people where, you know, we've had some kind of famous on the battlefield helicopter crashes. Helicopters shot down where 20, 16, 14 guys were killed instantaneously. I was overseas when some of these things happened. There were almost fist fights back at the main compound to get on the next helicopter to go into that site to secure that site and fight that fight. It's just the type of people that can stay resilient and focused that really do well in the job.

SPEAKER_00 10:21

Um, have you met David Goggins or was he part of your your deployment today?

SPEAKER_01 10:26

Yeah, Goggins is a good buddy of mine. He's a good buddy of mine. We never operated together, but we were um we were assigned at the end of our careers um to kind of do some recruiting and some training together. And so, yeah, I count him as a good friend.

SPEAKER_00 10:37

Amazing, amazing. I'd like to get him up in the show too at some point, uh, but I believe he's not taking any media now.

SPEAKER_01 10:45

Yeah, he's uh he's a savage, man. It's it's uh trying to figure out how to pin him down is is a tough thing. He's um he's one of those people that could just decide to you know maybe walk and swim around the earth two or three times just to test himself again. So you might not hear from him for a while.

SPEAKER_00 10:59

Yeah, exactly. He's a he's a hard morfo. But I mean he he's a he's a proper savage, you know, like you know, and you know. I mean, I read his book, what is this book called? You can't hurt me, right? Um what it like and like you just get a sense like he's not he's not cut from the normal fabric of mediocrity, you know what I'm saying? And I know he was he was very much there, he was very much the victim, but he's certain he certainly transformed himself. The seals are a big part of that. Um and and you know, but he talks about this idea of like, you know, stay hard. He uses F-bombs a lot in that sentence, but uh but it is really about as you say, it's about this resilience and and staying hard and being a savage, you know, staying a s stay a savage uh in order to be ruthless about the pursuit of attainment of whatever the victory is in your life. Um and I I know you mentioned resilience as a word, but uh what other kind of characteristics uh do you look for um in a modern Navy field? Stay with us.

SPEAKER_03 12:04

We'll be right back.

SPEAKER_00 12:07

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SPEAKER_01 13:06

So on the individual level, the resilience I think is something that if you don't have, you you're just not gonna you're not gonna become part of our our culture. You will not make it through basic training if you don't have what we've already discussed. But it's a good question to ask what are the other components? I'd say next on the list is um team ability or teamwork kind of potential. I mean, nope, we don't prosecute any missions alone. Uh every single um, you know, only Marcus uh Luttrell, who's a famous name in our circle, who ended up in a mountain Afghanistan with his teammates um, you know, killed at the hand of enemies and then ended up alone in the mountains. That's that's an unheard of scenario for the most part. We, at a minimum, even through basic training, you're constantly with what we call a swim buddy, somebody that you're going to be shoulder to shoulder with, um, working through problem sets, and then it goes up to boat crews and squads and assault teams. So um, the ability to work in a team, to subjugate yourself to the need of the team. A lot of people think of that word as a negative. We see subjugation as a good word in the sense that you're so committed to the goal, to the team, to the betterment of your teammate. I mean, nobody ever thinks about their own suffering on the battlefield. You're almost always concentrating on, you know, if Matt, you are my swim buddy, I'd be like, I want to make sure Matt's good. I want to make sure his gear's ready. If he's hurting, I got to be there for him. And I know you're gonna be doing the exact same thing for me. So teamwork and that focus of a team-oriented spirit is huge. Um, I think having a complete disdain, you use the word, it's one of my favorite. My coach uh in college used to talk about this, but a complete disdain for mediocrity of just being an average person. That's not who we're looking for. We're looking for the person that can go to the exceptional or find something within themselves that they either know they have or maybe they didn't know they have and they're gonna find it. Um and then um really just a tremendous um, you know, it sounds trite, but a positive attitude. I mean, you've talked to several other warriors, and if you talk to warriors from some of the most elite units, and you can go back and find this in literature from the Spartans to the samurai uh to the you know to the Romans, I mean, soldiers have a twisted sense of humor. Our guys laugh at things they shouldn't laugh at, they make fun of things that they shouldn't make fun of, they smile in the face of hideous onslaughts of both violence and tough times. And those are the people you want to be around when things get tough. I mean, nobody wants to be in a foxhole with somebody that's complaining. So if you have that in your personality, you you're designed for this job and you're designed for life. There's very little that can be thrown at you that you won't grind through.

SPEAKER_00 15:36

Tell me something, uh Rawke, if you don't mind. I know you mentioned the stats, 75 to 80 percent uh of you know applicants, if you can use that word, um, don't make it. What do you say to those who don't make the cut? Is it like, well, you didn't make it, cheers, you're out of here? And that's why I'd like to just understand what you what your views are on that group or that segment. And then are there are there any stats about how many actually come back and try again?

SPEAKER_01 16:01

There are. There are. Yeah, it's a great question. So uh, you know, the way a class works is early, you mentioned Hell Week. First phase of training is where the bulk of attrition takes place. So it's about seven weeks to get through first phase. Hell week is in around week five of those seven weeks, and you've actually been there in pre-training, so your body's already getting beat up before you start those seven weeks. Um, but about the time you get through Hell Week, most of the attrition has taken place. After that in training, unless you panic underwater, you're not comfortable in tough environments underwater, or you just literally don't have the capacity to learn at the rate that we need you to learn. I mean, one thing that's unique about our guys, our guys are like um learning supercomputers. And most of the military is this way. We're very good at training, focusing on a new piece of gear, equipment, technology, or tactic and adapting that quick to use it well on the battlefield. Um, but when somebody rings the bell in those first five weeks and leaves the program, um in my era, and I think they've tried to do an even better job of this, it they were kind of pretty quick to leave the program. I mean, in some ways, if you don't remove that person quickly, they can become somewhat of a cancer or a toxic force around the others, right? So it's time for them to move on. So they do get separated from the program quickly. Um, our psych doc, you know, talks to them, our medical staff looks at them, makes sure everything's clean and clear so they can move on to their job. And then usually one of our instructors will say, Hey, don't let this be, you know, the black mark of your life. One, if you're an enlisted um candidate, so you're not an officer, you do have a chance to come back. So if you quit, you can go back to the regular Navy, take on a new job in the regular Navy, hopefully like perform at a high level and come back and try the program again. And that does happen. I'd say the the the people for that um that happens are the ones that just showed up maybe right out of high school, they're maybe 19 years old, and were just not kind of emotionally ready for the program. You know, they just hadn't matured enough to do the job. And so some of those young lines will leave, they quit, they come back, and they're ready. You know, they've kind of learned the navy, they've learned that discipline, they move forward. Um, most of the older guys, you know, by our standards, let's call it mid-20s, late 20s, that have had that dream for a long time, got in, they quit, they they don't often come back. But I think that the what we want to leave them with is like, look, you came to one of the most elite programs of any military on earth, you didn't make it, it doesn't mean you've fallen short in your life. You've fallen short on this very specific, nuanced goal. Go excel in other places. And if you come back, you come back great. If you don't, go go discipline yourself and perform at a high level wherever you end up.

SPEAKER_00 18:33

Yeah. Um, so just a quick one about I want to talk more broadly about how the program has evolved. And I want to make specific mention to a chap who you write about called Richard Marcinko, he's the original uh commanding officer of Team Six. So he served from 1958 to 1989. Um, how has the SEALs ethos changed or has it changed over the years? And if so, how?

SPEAKER_01 18:58

Uh yeah, I mean, I I don't I don't talk a lot about Marchenko. He's one of our community legends. He started the you know the very uh fabled and I think highly regarded SEAL team six, which which for the layperson is kind of like our all-star team. So you compete at a regular SEAL team for a few rounds. If you want to go to our top elite team, that's the place you can go if you get selected to perform there. You know, in the Army, it's Delta Force. They have kind of their elite team there that you can come from Green Berets or Rangers or any other unit and go there. So those are kind of our all-star teams. Um, the ethos part is real interesting. The ethos, the actual SEAL ethos, if anybody of your listeners literally Googles SEAL ethos, it will come up. It is a document that we have written that's you know, part poetry, part ethics, part um, you know, fired up motivation and the standard and code of behavior we expect um from a team member. That happened in the time that I was there. When I went through training, the ethos did not exist. I mean, I think we knew we were producing a warrior culture that would be effective on the battlefield, but at some point midway through my career, uh, I think the senior leadership said, you know, the army units like the Rangers have the Ranger Creed and Green Berets have an ethos that's written, and all these other units have a written document that kind of describes who they are culturally. And so we put, you know, 50 some odd guys out on San Kimendi Island, one of the Channel Islands, uh an archipelago off the southern coast of California, and said, uh, let's codify the things we believe. So we wrote that ethos. And it's it's special. I mean, it talks about service and and you know, taking care of your teammate and staying in the fight and remaining hard and what you're responsible of doing. And um, and then it kind of says, you know, I am that man. So everybody that that has that ethos tries to live up to that document and that standard.

SPEAKER_00 20:44

I've got it up on screen share, guys, the seal ethos. Uh I Googled it. So have a look um up on the screen here. Now, just a quick one on the Green Bureets. Um, how different is the Green Bureau ethos to say, uh, you know, your ethos there in the SEALs?

SPEAKER_01 20:59

Oh, it's good. Uh, you know, I don't know the Green Berets ethos with their written document. I know the Ranger Creed um really well. I went to Ranger school even after I was uh a SEAL teammate. Uh and the creed's great. It's the it's it's the same thing. It's like, look, I will I'll be harder and push, push farther and take care of my teammate. It's it's very much all the same DNA. I mean, the things I think this is one of the interesting things about leadership. And you know, you talk about leadership and entrepreneurship and have people that talk about it. I I think one of the things that people, you know, maybe miss in the conversation is I think everybody's looking for a secret. Everybody's looking for, you know, what are the few pieces of things I need to know to perform well? The fact of the matter is they are not complicated. They're very simple. They're hard to do, but they're very, very simple. And I mean, if you walked into any bookstore in the United States and saw the section on self help improvement or leadership, you could put a blindfold on and grab five books, and 80% of the written word in there would be the same. I mean, the people that sell successful leadership books have just figured out a Way to repackage it and rebrand it, and I'd I'd be guilty of the same thing. You know you have to set the sample. You know you can't compromise your standard amongst your troops and expect them to do the same. You need to show up on time, you need to take care of them, you need to understand leadership and followership. Um, you need to stay disciplined, you need to have vision. I mean, this is not rocket science. It's just harder to do well, and that comes in a lot of different forms.

SPEAKER_00 22:29

You can now interact live with our guests, either online and or using your mobile phone. The number for the studio line is plus two seven seven nine nine double four eight six three four. The number again is zero seven nine nine double four eight six three four. Add that to your phone, guys, now, and we'll be happy to take your questions live on the Map Brown show. Yeah, cool. Um let's go to ah, there was this idea in your book that you uh land or you talk about called quote the global pursuit on hunting the world's bad guys.

SPEAKER_02 23:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 23:08

Can you walk us through this a bit more? What's your thinking around that?

SPEAKER_01 23:12

Yeah, I mean, uh that when I when I wrote the book, you know, we've been at war for over a decade, and now we're approaching two decades of sustained combat around the world. This is the longest, you know, certainly our country and all coalition forces have ever been at war uh against a common enemy, you know, in the modern era. So um I think those of us that have been to war think very you know clearly, very differently about it than those that haven't. I mean, it's it's the classic tale of old men, you know, in leadership positions send young men to go fight and die. Now, all of us in the SEAL teams, we want to fight. We like chasing dragons and we want to be in those adventures. Um, that being said, you start start to look at our enemy, you start to look at global politics and get a sense of what's happening in the world. And you're like, man, obviously, if you know anything about history, long-term engagement in Afghanistan does not seem to work out. I mean, Alexander is Macedonians, the British Empire, the Russian. I mean, how many empires do you want to talk about that have gone there to basically die and and um burn up all their resources in that place? So I I think I started thinking about this idea that there are targeted heads of bad guys all around the world. And we've seen it, I mean, our our original wars were very um very simple. Afghanistan migrated into Iraq. I mean, now we're in Syria and Chad and South, you know, you know, sub-Saharan Africa. I mean, we're all over the world, Indonesia, all these different places where we have um potential hotspots and flare-ups, let alone the massive um players in the chess piece like Russia and China and these type organizations uh or or nation states. So my global pursuit idea was just kind of the idea of tasking um special operations units in particular, but I think conventional units could do it as well, to hey, you know, bad by bad guy X uh, you know, is a member of Al-Shabaab in Africa, put him up on the FBI top 10 most one list. He just got assigned to SEAL team one. We're hunting you until we find you. And just put them on their heels a little bit. Don't have it be something where they feel like they can be comfortable around the world. And look, we proved the method. It took us 10 years to find uh bin Laden, but we didn't stop and we got him. So uh I think it would put uh bad guys in a tough spot to know that an individual special operations unit is now dedicating their entire lives to hunting them. So I had fun with it a little bit, but I also don't think um it's far off global strategy of taking out bad targeted individuals uh in a global pursuit as opposed to full-scale all-engage warfare.

SPEAKER_00 25:45

Speaking of um of the real life accounts, I actually find that there's not too many uh first-person accounts. I don't know what your experience is um of um of these kind of you know real-world war situations. Uh either it's not meant to be written about or they can't really get across everything that really goes on on the ground for whatever reason. Uh could you describe for us what kind of um you know situations seals would run into on their missions? Any kind of stories or anecdotes uh you can share just for our audiences to really get their heads and their minds into what it means to be a seal on the ground.

SPEAKER_03 26:23

Stay with us. We'll be right back.

SPEAKER_00 26:27

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SPEAKER_01 27:27

Yeah, I mean, the the the thing that's so fun about being, I think, in all of special operations, and SEALs, I think, have a unique place within that is you know, we were originally, and still by doctrine, we are the maritime component of Special Operations Command. So all our operations were supposed to be in and around the water. Well, all of a sudden we go to war in two nations that are basically landlocked, and we weren't going to miss the fight. So we we adapted, you know, our skill set, our technology, our gear, our methodology and training to start attacking targets in the mountains, in the deserts and do those jobs. And our guys are so creative in their ability to pro solve problems and adapt to environments that it was a very, very easy transition. When you think of the sea, the cold, pitiless, relentless nature of the ocean, if you've somewhat, no, no, no seal would ever say mastered that, but have figured out a way to excel and and survive in that environment, it feels like the mountains and deserts and all that stuff become far, far easier in many ways. It's not a great one-for-one exchange. But when we get on the battlefield, we really don't go with a tremendous amount of you know packaged, pre-planned mission sets. What we do is go to an area. There's going to be some combatant commander, whether that's a Marine or an Army colonel or a Navy Admiral that might be in charge of a battle space. And we usually just go up to the scene of leadership and say, How can we help? How can we figure out a way to service you and to affect the battlefield? And they either have a really good idea of what they need, and then we figure out how to source and service that. Or if they don't have a good sense, we're just going to get our hands dirty, start, you know, getting into the culture, getting into the battle zone, and figure out how best we think we can influence the battlefield. And then we'll probably go right back to commander and say, hey, we think you know, sniper overwatch or targeted sniper missions are going to help you. We think we can protect uh some mainline forces by getting you good reconnaissance um in an area in a secretive way that your folks can go through a region safely where they wouldn't have otherwise. We think there's these eight high-value targets. If you give us clearance to go remove those targets from the battlefield, we think it will have a major impact, and we do that. So we really um take a broader view and a creative view of how to how to help the battlefield. If somebody said, look, the way you help the battlefield is uh is to you know go hunt a bunch of uh Ibex in the mountains of Afghanistan because we need better food in the Chow Hall, we'd probably figure out a way to go hunt Ibex. So we we we we get creative and figure out how to help the battlefield. That's that's the real secret of it. As far as the you know, in-field engagements, you know, if you read my book, Jocko's book, a lot of other fields, other you know, military service members, you'll get some of the firsthand accounts of individual combat operations. You know, Chris Kyle was one of uh Leif and Jocko's primary snipers. Needless to say, you know, this guy's one of the most prolific shooters, snipers in the history of the U.S. military. You want some gunfighting stories, you you you read his book, you'll get them.

SPEAKER_00 30:26

Cool. Um, one of the interesting things I wanted to talk to you about was in your book, you talk about keys to success. And one of those keys to success is this idea of being in the intolerance of failure or intolerant to failure. Um, and the essence of that and the spirits of the core. Um, how is that uh is that true? And is that or how is that applicable to everyday life for leaders?

SPEAKER_01 30:52

Yeah, well, when I when I write about it, I mean one thing I really key on is to go fail your tail off as often as you can, because that means you're pushing and getting into a place uh where you're uncomfortable, you're gonna learn, and you're gonna kind of inoculate yourself to hard times and failure. So when I say intolerance of failure, it's actually failing as often as you can, but not giving up, right? You get knocked off the horse, you get knocked down, you get back up. And if you get back up every time and you get back up often enough, you know you can get back up. I mean, that's one of the things in our ethos is that you just fight till your last breath. And that that's the way our guys think. They're just gonna fight with every bullet, every, I mean, if we got down to the only thing left in our arsenal was a knife or our fist, we'd fight with those until we couldn't fight anymore. That's just the way we're designed um to kind of attack the battlefield, and it's the way we also attack life. Our guys don't really deal well with failure in so much that we we won't accept it. We're gonna keep pushing um until we get to the place we want to get. So I think failure is the greatest teacher we have as uh species, right? You figure something out and you see it. If you have kiddos, um, anyone that's listening right now that has kids gets to watch it in real time. You watch them fail and struggle. And if you're that parent that always swoops in and does it for them, that they won't learn. But if you back off for a second and watch them struggle, which is tough, you realize that they figure things out and then they've got it learned and they move forward. So I'm for failure. I'm a huge, huge um uh fan of failure in so much that it teaches you how to how to grind and keep driving towards successes.

SPEAKER_00 32:27

Cool. I couldn't agree with you more. Um the thing is though, if you think about mediocrity, people who generally find themselves in that kind of you know, territory of mediocrity, it's because Largy, I would say, well, I suppose a big contributing factor would be the fact that they don't want to fail. They don't want to they don't want to uh you know sit in what it feels like to fail. Um and and it's not easy, right? You almost need to cultivate it's like resilience to failure, the intolerance to failure, essentially. Um and so I wanted to kind of get into this whole idea of mediocrity, which we touched on earlier, which for me is also kind of like a big trend today. It's like everywhere you look, there's mediocrity, right? Um and so if you're going to be a leader of a high performance team, you cannot be tolerant of that kind of stuff. Um and so um more broadly then, if you if you're tolerant of mediocrity, it will without question limit your ability to survive and ultimately succeed in a world which is becoming more and more uncertain. So, what's your advice today, uh, Rourke, for someone living in what they would describe as a mediocre life? What are your words of wisdom to them today?

SPEAKER_01 33:38

Yeah, I mean, you touched on it. I think taking risk, I think challenge yourself and doing hard things. You know, this is again one of those things that you're not gonna find uh any seal that talks about our culture or our beliefs uh that that avoided um discomfort. I mean, we we waded straight into it and asked for it because we know um on the other side of discomfort, on the other side of challenging times, on the other side of taking risks is where all the glory and good stuff lies. I mean, nobody ever jumped up and celebrated something easy that they did. It's just not something worth celebrating. But you go and get that, you know, college degree, that master's degree, you go learn a skill or a craft, you go pursue a goal, whether that's running an Iron Man or a marathon or you know, the best personal time on a CrossFit workout, those are the things that that kind of enrich our lives when we do hard things. So I think, you know, I talk a lot about the merits of suffering and doing hard things. And that is a that is a pillar or an element of life. And when you're not doing it, um you're really not pushing yourself to a place where I think we enjoy um life. I think uh, you know, one of the greatest lines ever written in the great documents of our country is you know, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. One of the things I think people don't realize is the pursuit is the important part of that line. It's not the end state. The way you get to, and I think the founding fathers knew this, the way you get to happiness is the pursuit. That's the key line. It's struggling and going hard. And I can tell right now, I'm you know, I'm in my my mid-40s, I'm not a seal, you know, at a functional team anymore. And now it's figuring out what's that next ridge line, what's that next struggle in challenge to keep doing that because you you know, when you're not, you just kind of get lazy and you feel like you're not in the fight. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 35:27

I love that because that's exactly what I've been prescribing on this show for quite some time now. It's like, I don't know where it comes from. I actually think I was I've got two young kids. I don't know if you've got um you do have kids, right? I do, yeah. Yeah, so I got two young ones, like they're five and two. So there's a lot of nursery rhymes on on like Netflix and things like that. Sure. And one of the things that um I I listened to the words of the nursery, and I'm trying to understand what's the lesson behind them? Because these all of these these uh these um nursery rhymes are old. Like they've been told for like, you know, who got who knows, like you know, a hundred years, fifty years. Like like one of the one of just as a as an example, right? One of those is like the kittens who lost their mittens, right, won't get any pie. Right. So think about what that means. If you if you make a mistake, if you lose your mittens, you don't get what you want. Right? Yeah. You don't get the pie at the end of the day. It'll cost you. It'll cost you. But and the other thing also, it's like there's many of them, right? And it's just insane because it's like, where does the idea come from that mediocre is okay? Do you know what I'm saying?

SPEAKER_01 36:38

It's just is Yeah, I mean, it I think that's one of the tough things. I I can tell you're keying in on it, and it bothers you, and it bothers me, is that it does feel like um we have gotten to a level of excess and comfort and um ease that I think is making entire populations weak and soft. I mean, you you want the the most colorful language you can find. Go ahead and watch David Goggins' Instagram with F-bombs galore about how soft the world has become. And I'd I'd be careful trying to pursue his level of hardness, but it's true. I mean, you can go from a climate-controlled house to a climate-controlled car to a climate-controlled office and return, even go through a drive-thru and get your coffee into a cup that'll keep it the same temperature and then get to where you want to go. There is absolutely no need to struggle or do hard things anymore. There's not a need. And I think there's a bunch of people that actually believe, sad as is, why would you? Isn't that wonderful what we've created? And I think as we see, particularly in this country, the division of this country between the political classes and the haves and the haves nots, and and you know, watching young people just complain about, I mean, finding things to complain about when we live in this time of unbelievable plenty and excess, it's tough. And, you know, as I look at the current state of the world as we we're doing this, we're in a you know global pandemic, it kind of, I hope it rattles the tree a little bit to be like, hey, the foundation of all your comfort could go away like that. And if you're the type of person that stayed lazy, doesn't have skill sets, hasn't pushed yourself to get uncomfortable, when it gets really uncomfortable, and even this pandemic hasn't. I mean, we're still living at home watching Netflix all day. It's not exactly brutal, but you know, very quickly a different virus could turn it into a very different state. Uh, those that know how to get out there and survive and be tough, I think, are going to be the winners at the end of that stuff. So yeah, I and I love your nursery rhyme stuff. I mean, yeah, some of the stuff I read to my kiddos and look at, I'm like, it can't be said better than Dr. Seuss just said it. I mean, he just said better, he's got better philosophy in his writing than than most of the uh you know the ancients. He probably has better wisdom than Aristotle. Yeah, it's it's simple stuff, it's just hard to do.

SPEAKER_00 38:43

Yeah, exactly right. But uh, yeah, I mean, it is largely about suffering. It's this idea that, you know, uh life's meant to be easy and it's actually not, it's meant to be hard. It's meant to be hard. And the sooner you accept the fact that it's meant, you're you are you were built to suffer. You know, if you like, if you do a hundred sit-ups, what happens? You hurt. It's part of the the the DNA of who you are. You must hurt in order to grow. Um but as you said earlier, right? But we don't we don't put ourselves in uncomfortable situations sufficiently enough. We just kind of like, well, Netflix, I'm gonna Netflix and chill. It's like my grandfather was in the second world war as well. Uh I've got his medals here in at the house. Um and yeah, and he too. Yeah, you too. So so like in their in their days, it was like when when the the crapola, I'm not I'm trying not to swear because of Facebook, they banned they ban all of our media. But um but when the crapola hits the fan, right? Um at that time in the second world, first world war, they you were like being called to put your life on the line. Now with co with COVID, it's like you're being called to sit on your couch and chill. And people complain about it.

SPEAKER_01 39:52

Sorry, sorry, yeah. No, you go 100%. I mean, I feel bad. It's like there's young people that are that are missing graduations and missing all these you know special things that normally happen in the spring. If you have any sense of history, you're like, well, there's a whole bunch of people that graduated and went straight to basic training and then went directly to Vietnam or the trenches of World War I and World War II. So let's be careful about how bad it is. I mean, I get it. I I would hate to have things canceled as well, but there have been some tougher times to uh uh have a tough thing to happen when you graduated in the spring.

SPEAKER_00 40:23

Yeah, totally, man. Totally, totally. Um, I want to deto, if you don't mind. Um, you've been, well, directing some of the what you could call the indoctrination programs for Navy SEALs. Um, and one of the ideas that uh that I came across in doing research into your kind of thinking in that is this idea of, quote, hero or zero missions that your graduating SEALs uh sometimes uh uh you know undertake. Um what is a hero or zero mission and what parallels are there between this kind of idea to the modern day business world?

SPEAKER_01 40:56

Yeah, I mean, I you know, I think um I think we have this this there's a real premium on what we do obviously in our job where the the consequences for our performance on the battlefield are obviously absolutely off the charts. I mean, most people in their business lives, whether they be leaders, um, you know, unless you're doing surgery in uh in a in a you know high pressure situation, life and death situation, most of the results of your behavior is probably not gonna be life and death. For us, it is. So when our mission sets um get stacked up and we go to execute on those missions, the the difference between success and failure could be the difference between success of the mission or somebody going home in a pine box with a flag draped over the coffin. So the the intensity level of what we do is so off the charts that I think it does bake in and breed into our personnel or our teammates an ability to handle any stresses moving forward and perform at a high level no matter what, because everything after this job is a little bit of a reduction in intensity compared um to our last life. When it comes to leadership off the battlefield, I I think you can you can almost make it more intense in your mind and would probably benefit yourself and your team if you did so. If people in leadership positions really did realize, and I think we're very much realizing right now with a bunch of people at home not working, most of whom live paycheck to paycheck, that when you're a leader, when you're in a strategic role, your decisions, your focus, your drive, your commitment to the job does become a matter of life and death or health and well-being of a bunch of people that work for you. Um, the thing I saw very, very early in my military career is um there are all different types of leaders. I mean, we could probably identify 25 different leadership styles or types if we looked at it, but I kind of broke it down to two that seemed very, very successful or unsuccessful. The leader that realized the higher they went up the chain of command, the higher they raised on that flagpole or in the you know the business space, the further out into that C-suite office they arrived, that the more people they now worked for, so they they now had the more opportunity to serve everyone below them in the chain of command, those are the leaders that their people will follow them to the ends of the earth. They will never fail that leader when they know that leader is there to pick up those burdens and and and suffer on their behalf and guide them to a great place. The leaders that go up that chain of command to think, oh, now I'm in a leadership position, all these people below me work for me, catastrophic. I I mean nobody wants to work for that leader. So I think if you think in terms, and I servant leadership has been kind of a coin phrase that I think looks like it. I I hate like specific, you know, dialed names for leadership styles because everybody's different. And you got to be an authentic leader, whatever that that looks like. I've seen screaming leaders that were actually really effective. They weren't fun to work for, but they're effective. And I've seen real cerebral leaders that were quiet and effective and ineffective. But if you have committed to the belief that the higher you go in rank and power, The more people you serve, your folks will do anything for you. That's the leader people want to work for.

SPEAKER_00 44:06

That's very interesting because I have a very particular leadership style. It's very direct, it's very, you know, militant, I would say, it's very discipline focused, outcomes focused, performance. Like you do or do, there's no try here. Like if you try if you want to try shit, go and try and go work that somewhere, you know, go try somewhere else. Because you're not part of this business. Uh because it's it's like going to war every day. That's that's kind of how I describe it. And I give it, I give my team a lot of you know, rope. Sometimes I say, Well, you're CEO, you decide to buy. You know, um so I let them kind of like make make mistakes or encourage them to make mistakes. And I love what you said there about uh you know leaders serve the team, the team does not serve the leader. It's it's that that statement when I when I first heard you said, it really kind of it it agitates me in a sense because I know that it's true. And I also know that uh that I don't think that I serve my team as much as I should because I'm leading. And and I guess where I'm going with this is that I've learned that leadership comes at a cost. If you want to be like an excellent, amazing leader, there's a price that you will have to pay, even if you win. Have you discovered have you discovered that as well?

SPEAKER_01 45:17

No, 100%. And and let me you know hopefully assuage your you know, maybe frustration hearing what I said. What I what I didn't mean by that is the leader that serves is somebody that is their buddy, their friend, takes care of their needs, you know, above and beyond the organizational needs or the requirement for success. Because like I said, what I mean by that is that there's all different styles, and your direct, militant, in-your-face, challenging style by all means can work with flying colors, particularly if you have the right type of people to kind of accept that behavioral trait and that style. And if you're authentic and your judgment is sound, right? Like the only people that fail that are direct and driven and focused and hard are those that don't have good judgment and the ability to make sound decisions. When you are hard on a team, but the results are great because you had the right concept, that's a team that I want to be a part of every time. So I wouldn't get um frustrated about thinking you're not serving your people. Serving your people does not mean being nice, friendly, or um accommodating at all times. I mean, I totally agree with you. And yes, without question, there is a very real and sometimes painful toll to be a leader. I see being a truly great leader as much as you cultivate teams and think of the organization, the well-being of the team, um, I think there's tremendous isolation as a leader. I think you're gonna feel lonely. I think you need to figure out a way to probably have peers in either a different organization or a different company that you can spend time with and rub elbows with because you're sort of at the tip of the mountain and and out in an isolated place. I was aware early in my SEAL career, um, we're very close knit, very tight. Guys go out drinking together, officer and enlisted, and you won't see that in a lot of other um military organizations. But I recognize early on that it, that like even with my junior officer kind of time, if you're out with the boys, like if they're staying out the two in the morning, you should probably leave at midnight. You should probably leave a little bit early and let them get in those late night antics and be away from that so you don't compromise your leadership position, your style, your gravitas, your respect. Um, and and and just keep enough separation that you feel like you can make those hard calls, you can hold them accountable to things that um you would demand, obviously, from yourself and from them. So uh yeah, no, it it comes at leadership comes at a tremendous cost, and it's by no means a uh you know gilded, easy path. It's a it's a journey and almost always a struggle. I just think if you're designed to be a leader, you really seek it out, then you gotta you gotta suffer that intensity to do it well.

SPEAKER_00 47:56

Yeah, well Steve Jobs is renowned for that, wasn't he? There was that there was that story where they were designing the first iPod. You know, they're one of the first ones, and he said he said, make it small. And so they went away and they made or you know, made it as small as they can. And he said, they said they presented it to him and said, This is the iPod. And he went, okay. He said, Is this the smallest you can make it? And they went, yeah, yeah. So he took the iPod and threw it into a fish tank and bubbles came out. And he said, Look, bubbles came out. It's not as small as you can make it. Try again. He was like he was like ruthless with them, right? Um and and that story is perfect to where I want to go now because Leif actually told me this thing with a statement. He said, It's not what you say, it's what you tolerate. Um and because he said, you know, you can say whatever you want to your team as long as the underlying relationship is strong enough. Um and I wanted to get your views on this. What is your view, you know, on that kind of statement as a leader?

SPEAKER_01 48:54

It's a phenomenal statement. I love it. Doesn't surprise me. You know, he's a fantastic both combat leader and and leader at large. Um, I love that comment. I mean, I do think it it is without question the case. It reminds me of a story when we um were getting ready to deploy to Iraq in 2006 with that team. I was in a separate assault team. I came into um our team room where we kind of just you know do our planning and meet every day for our meetings when we're not training and out doing things. But I know you've seen on on combat units we wear patches, you know, a patch with some artistic design on it that kind of represents your team and represents some ethos of what you're doing. So, you know, there's skulls like Jocko's team was the Punisher skull. You know, they had that um for task unit bruiser. And we we were getting ready to design our patch. And I remember I come into the platoon hut, and there's usually an artist in your team, so they're doing some cartoons or rendering of what the patch might look like. And I looked up on the wall, and it was um it was a bunch of like knights, almost like medieval era knights and kind of crusader type patches up on the board. And I I as soon as I walked in, it got quiet. I mean, everybody on my team knew who was in charge, and I took that very seriously, and and I would have the final vote, although I very much take the input of my my troops, but I looked on the wall, I was like, what do we got going on here, boys? And they're like, Oh, we're designing the patch to go over to seas. I said, Great. I said, it kind of looks like crusader patches. And they're like, Yeah. I was like, Christian Crusader patches, yes? And they said, yeah. I said, okay, does anybody know what our actual mission tasking is for this summer in 2006 in Iraq? And you know, hands kind of went up, but it was like, you know, to go engage the enemy, to attack high-value targets and do that. I was like, yeah, it's all subsets of our mission. Our actual tasking is to help and build and partner with the 3-1 Iraqi begrade, the local Iraqis, and get them prepared to prosecute these missions so we can leave Iraq. It is a partnership between us and a Muslim country. Do we think that Crusader patches are gonna help us in that task of partnering with an Islamic fighting force? And everybody gets quiet. And I was like, hey, to be honest, can anybody name to me the century of which the first and second crusades launched? Crickets in the room. I said, can anybody name the country from which we disembarked Europe or headed into the Middle Eastern territory to fight for Jerusalem and these lands? Crickets. I was like, look, so we can't go too seriously into the history of the Crusades and the Knights Templar, those that prosecuted these missions and go over there and create a good semblance of connection to our partner force over in Iraq. So those ideas died on the vine. And I was delighted because we actually deployed without a pet patch, and then I felt terrible. I'm like, what a jerk I am, man. I didn't even like help facilitate getting a new patch. Within about three weeks of being in country, our platoon, our team, was wearing the third Iraqi brigade patch. We were wearing their combat patch. And now you're like, here we go, boys, we're doing it right. And so if I'd tolerate it, I mean, look, there's total, you know, connective tissue between the Crusades and the current war, no matter what anybody wants to say political correctness-wise or otherwise. I don't see us as a empire building force or going to, you know, slaughter Muslims in a foreign land. But I said, this is not gonna bode well for us on the battlefield. And so Lace, right. If you tolerated that, you would not have been leading uh in an effective way. And and you know, I certainly wasn't gonna tolerate it in my team.

SPEAKER_00 52:30

Yeah, exactly. Uh guys, keep keep those questions coming. I'm gonna take a whole bunch of questions from you now uh in a second. Mike, I see you out there, and then a few of you other ones, forget your names. I'll come back to you in a second. Um, so I'm I was laughing to myself when you mentioned crickets because I get crickets from my team all the time. It's like it's that's how you know you're being a leader, right? Because when you start something and then you get silence. Like there is no speaking. It's like you can hear the engine turning. That's hilarious, man. Um, so oh yeah, uh, you did a uh keynote talk, and you're talking about the Spartans, you know, that movie 300? Uh the gates of fire, 300 Spartans sent on a suicide mission to fight uh you know a one million strong army. Um and you talk about the Spartan King, and I think it was a uh like I forget the term. Is it a scribe or someone like you know was a part of Squire, thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Um can you walk us through that story and its lessons on leadership?

SPEAKER_01 53:34

Yeah, there's uh so Gates of Fire is a book written by Stephen Pressfield, and there's been volumes written about the Peloponnesian Wars. 300, the movies came out, and that probably blew it out in the most public space. But Pressfield, who is a phenomenal, phenomenal writer and thinker and has actually become a friend and mentor, that Gates of Fire book about the 300 Spartans is the first book a senior SEAL gave me when I showed up my first SEAL team. He's like, hey, you want to know what we believe in and who we are as a fighting force, a fighting culture? This is who we are, the Spartans. This very, very, you know, rugged, disciplined, um, you know, undaunted force that was willing to go against even the American League superior forces and fight as good as anybody in the world in that that given era of combat. Um, the point I bring up about Leonidas is in that um, it's it, you know, Pressfield's book Gates of Fire is a fictional novel, but it has tremendous historical accuracies to it. But these 300 Spartans basically go out on what would be a suicide mission to repel Xerxes, this Persian emperor who wanted to dominate the world, as all emperors and conquerors do. And they were just trying to hold up that Persian force long enough so the rest of Sparta and the Greek states could prepare for the fight that would probably either win or cede the overarching campaign. And um, the the book is told from these conversations of Xerxes, actually after he's defeated these Spartans, after multiple days of combat and those 300 inflicting untold numbers of casualties numerically by 10x, 100x on his force, he finds a Spartan squire, not even a mainline Spartan citizen or warrior, but a squire alive, and it's interviews between this squire and the Spartan or this Persian king, just about the culture of Sparta. And at one point, the Persian asks about the Spartan king in particular, because he had never seen a king on the front line, shoulder to shoulder with his troops, doing multiple lines of fighting until he himself fell in battery battle. The kings were always in the rear, like he was, sitting under a shaded tent watching his warriors fight. If he wins, he gets to take the victory lap. King loses, they concede the field and probably get even more enriched because the conqueror knows the king will be taken care of in the next fight. And so the Persian emperor is asking this squire about Leonidas. I need to understand the quality of this king. Because there's no way I'm going to go fight 10,000 Spartans after what 300 just did to us without knowing about it. And so there's this passage in Gates of Fire where this squire talks about this Spartan leader and he says, I will tell his majesty what a king is. A king does not abide within his tent while his men bleed and die upon the field. A king does not sleep while his men stand watch upon the wall, nor dine when they go hungry. A king lifts up the burdens first and sets them down last. He earns their love by the sweat of his own back and the pains he endures for their sake. A king um serves, you know, basically a king serves them, not they him. It's just this unbelievable passage about what we're talking about. That leader that stood up there in front of his troops, shoulder to shoulder with them, and never asked them to do something he wouldn't be willing to do himself. And so that's the kind of story, and I just talk about, you know, again, I highlight in some of my keynote addresses that if you are that leader and you pick those burdens up first, the sweat of your back that you'll earn for their sake, your troops' sake, your your team will follow you to the end of the earth if you're that type of leader. And that that's what I like to highlight. It's it's a phenomenal read. Anybody that's listening, if they haven't read Gates of Fire, uh, it's something special.

SPEAKER_00 57:23

Great. I'll post it up in the show notes. Um yeah, it's that uh idea that leaders eat last, right? Um just like on it. I need to get in some questions, Rourke, I'm getting killed. Sure, sure. Um hang on, let me get onto this one. This one's from Mike in the USA. Uh thanks, Mike, for checking in. He says, Do you have any examples or can you or can you illustrate uh sorry, do you have any examples that you can illustrate of leadership improvisation in combat situations? So where things have not gone according to plan, uh with the objective of making decisions in a dynamic situation?

SPEAKER_01 58:01

Yeah, I mean, I I think uh I think um one of the things I enjoyed so much about being in the SEAL teams is is we don't really have a playbook. I mean, we have tactics and procedures that we practice that we know, um the way you move, shoot, and communicate, the basics of that we teach. From that point on, it's really on every uh tactical element leader and any individual SEAL or swim pair or or or um you know individual shooter to make complex, rapid, and quick decisions on the battlefield and do so creatively. So we really look at the battlefield as an open canvas and you can paint whatever you want on it, but depending on how well it'll work. It stays bound by these rules that you can't violate, um, but those are very minimal compared to the creativity that can be brought to the battlefield. So I feel like every combat engagement we were in, it almost never went by the X's and O's and how we had, you know, written the playbook up on the board before we went in the target. It's just like, you know, Mike Tyson, the great American boxer, says everybody's got a plan until you get hit in the face. And that's that's how it works on the battlefield. You know, you think you have a plan and then something goes sideways. So our guys were always looking for new ways to get creative. We were on sniper missions at one point. We recognized that the houses in this rural area, if we got in there at night and we got in a house, there was almost no way that the locals wouldn't know we were there. Somebody would know something was off in that village. So the guys that were planting roadside bombs or or assault units wouldn't come anywhere near where we were because they knew if they got in a fight with us, they wouldn't like it. So one of my guys found we were on a on a very old British military base there in Iraq. And one of our guys found one of those classic big box, kind of almost like um video surveillance cameras that you'd have on, you know, like your loading docks or or out front of a bank, you know, just a big video camera. And my buddy brought that on a mission. We literally put one of those things up on like a lamppost. It didn't even have a cord coming out of it, but he rigged it in such a way that it looked like it was an actual surveillance camera. And the bad guys couldn't help themselves. They could not help themselves. They had to go out and try and cut it down and then figure out what's going on. It did not even have a cable coming out of it. And we got in a massive gunfight, which actually is what we were trying to do with these bad guys, you know, got that done and moved on. And so we'd carry that camera with us all over the place and it wasn't plugged into anything. And it was just the type of thing that one of our guys came up with and got creative on the battlefield and it paid huge dividends. So I think that's one of the things, too, as a leader, Mike, that you also want to make sure you're listening to your troops because they're gonna come up with phenomenal ideas. I I don't think I ever came up with the best idea in my team, but I aggregated the best ideas and then led those well on the battlefield.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:42

Yeah, because it's like crowdsourcing, right? It's kind of like they have they know more about what's really going on than you do. So it's your job to listen, to understand, not to respond, but to understand what the hell's going on so that you can make the best decision. So just a couple more questions here, uh Rourke. This one is from Shunty. Uh, on American Grit, which is uh obviously reality TV program series in the US was a big hit. Did you have a chance to connect with John Cena?

SPEAKER_01 1:01:12

Oh, yeah, John's become a good buddy. Um we hit it off kind of right away, actually before that show came out. Big John and I were talking about a different show. Um we were gonna do something different, and then it morphed into American Grit. Um so I, you know, he asked me to participate in that one with him and then the other um military mentors. We had a Marine, a Ranger, uh, another Army member kind of leading these four teams. Um but yeah, we were constantly, you know, around each other, spending time. And then he and I have since um become good friends. So we spent a lot of time together. He is one of the great human beings. Uh I count as a good friend. He is as uh humble and authentic a global superstar as you're ever gonna meet. And he'd rather just be in a pair of jeans and a t-shirt and sitting by a campfire eating a steak or smoking a cigar or having a beer with buddies than be on a major stage as a movie star. He's a he's a and he's you know rocket ship smart, super good human being. Yeah, I count him as a good friend. Lucky to know him.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:09

Awesome, awesome, awesome. Uh, this one's from Andrea. She says, uh, this is the she's talking about you now. This is the guy from Act of Valor. That's a movie. Um what was it like filming that movie? I'm supposed she's making some assumptions there. So you didn't act, right?

SPEAKER_01 1:02:24

Or did you you were in the Well yeah, I mean we were we were the we were the actors of the movie. I was joking with you earlier that if you're going to that movie to see see the acting, you probably picked the wrong film. Um it was strange, to be honest. I mean, we got put on orders, active duty orders, just like you get a set of orders or a tasking to go to sniper school or communication school or an intelligence program to go make this movie for the purpose of kind of authentically representing our culture. We had had a real dip in recruiting or kind of um new folks coming in, and we needed to kind of highlight some things that we're doing to hopefully get uh the right people into training. And so that was one of the impetuses for the movie. Um, all of us that participated thought that thing was gonna go to like the bottom of a bin in a Walmart DVD case, you know, that it would just never see the light of day and probably turn into a recruiting film, and next thing we know, it becomes the number one movie in America. So it was very strange. I mean, the nice thing was we more or less got to play ourselves. We tried to make it authentic. We also looked at every piece of footage that we filmed, and we had a deal with the directors and the film crew to be like, hey, you can't show this angle, you can't show this move or tactic because we didn't want to give a playbook to our enemies. So we're very, very careful about what we did and didn't show. So while it's exciting and authentic, we didn't give away tactics or procedures that um we didn't need to give to the enemy. And um it was fun. I mean, I I I have uh I'm probably a split personality on it. Part of me really enjoyed that I did it, and part of me um regret isn't in the right word, but um, we didn't know from that point that so much um intensity and media would be shined on the seals, and a lot of it not generated by us. I mean, you know, as soon as we killed bin Laden, you know, the president announced it like within hours as opposed to it was supposed to be several days later so the guys can get back from that mission. And and so so many of these missions have been thrust in the eye, and I try into the public eye, and I try and be careful. I'm you know publicly talking about it, but I I I try and hold myself to a very high standard where I only talk about the higher ideals, the higher concepts that can help people in their personal lives, their business lives, developing a culture and a high-performing team, and not um take too much credit for what the organization, the teams have done um exceptionally well in the battlefield. But it it was fun. It was fun.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:38

How how realistic is it then? I mean, uh if you were just like 10 being too totally real to you know, I don't know if I could give a number.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:45

I mean, one of the reasons it's called act of valor is every single major piece of the movie comes directly from our history. So um uh a teammate of ours got shot 27 times, shot the four bad guys in the room, and walked to the helicopter to go get medical attention. A guy got hit by a rocket pal grenade and it didn't go off, so he survived it. And then Jocko and and Leif's teammate, um, Mikey Monsour jumped on a grenade to save his teammates on the battlefield and earned the Medal of Honor for those uh those those actions. So um, as far as realism, we pulled most of the the kind of um individual acts out of our history. The geopolitical thread of a jihadist out in Cambodia and trying to build vests and things was a little bit pulled to make just a storyline, but it's it's pretty authentic.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:33

Sweet. I haven't actually seen that. I'm gonna watch that for sure. Um cool guys, we've got to wrap this up. We have uh overshot. So do apologize to all of you who we haven't got your questions. Um so we're gonna do our uh segment here where we're gonna give away some stuff. So let's get into that then. So Gibbs from the MapRound show. Uh Raw, what uh what can the guys get from you today? So

SPEAKER_01 1:06:00

Well, I I think the best way to kind of connect with me is if you go to my website, which is rorkdenver.com. And I think Matt said he'd throw up a link to it so you can get to it. But you go to my website, which kind of goes to my brand, which I call Ever Onward. I have a spot at the bottom of that site. If you just go down the bottom, you can sign up for something that I call my Commander's Coffee. So every month I release a video, it's free to sign up. I release a video every month about human performance, culture, leadership. Some principle I'm talking about. I've done several amidst amidst the pandemic to talk about time horizons and service and things like that. But if you sign up for my commander's coffee, I'd love to have you there. And I won't beat you up with weekly uh, you know, every Tuesday emails. It'll be about one a month, maybe two, um, to give you some good content and enjoy.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:46

Okay, cool. I'm actually going to bring it up on the screen here. So this is rockdanver.com. So where do I go? Is it uh campfire sessions or somewhere on the home?

SPEAKER_01 1:06:55

Uh no, it will be called my commander's coffee. Campfire sessions are another thing that you can go on, and um those are things that have already been completed, but you could uh you could purchase those online and they're there are a bunch of sessions that are longer format, kind of almost like live podcast um sessions of their enders, but uh my commander's coffee, I don't have it in front of me, and I'll probably hang up on you if I try and pull it up right now.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:16

No, please don't. I'm actually got it up here so everyone can actually see what I'm doing. So I'm putting in my name, playing in my email address, and signing up. So boom, that's as simple as it gets to get some real commander's coffee right there, dude. So um last question for you, uh Raw, why do you do what you do? What gets you out of bed in the morning?

SPEAKER_01 1:07:36

I think, I think, you know, the it's kind of incomparable from your last life on active duty and the SEAL teams to figure out what purpose and and what is gonna get you out and up every day. I mean, one, I'm a I'm a I'm a husband and a father, so that's a pretty big motivating driving force to make sure I'm doing right by my family and raising um awesome human beings to attack this world with with vigor and and goodness and integrity and all that good stuff. So that's that's a primary driving force. And then really, I love helping people, I love motivating people, I love guiding people in their journey. Um so this consulting and writing and thinking about leadership and culture and human performance and high-performing teams um has been a tremendous passion. I've enjoyed it. Um I'm missing a little bit of some of the getting my hands dirty work. So I'm starting a new company and new business right now. Matt will have to do another one maybe in six months, and that thing will be up and running. But I want to do some more training and kind of mental preparedness and mental toughness and actual um, you know, preparing, you know, your family, your home, your your team um for the highest level of performance. So more to come on on that front the next time we talk. But uh I I've enjoyed every chapter of my life and I feel like I got more adventure in front of me than I have behind me. It's gonna be great.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:50

Awesome, dude. Well, listen, obviously, it goes without saying I'd love to have you back. I I've actually I think about what you I think about mental toughness all the time. All the time. Um, and I'm looking for for something actually, weirdly enough. So if you as soon as you have something, I'd happy to be to test it and promote it. I love it. Bang the hell out of it. Uh, just one more thing. I've got some people asking me, they've been on your website now, they're saying, do you post your your um your shop uh stuff to South Africa? Or can you?

SPEAKER_01 1:09:20

Um that's a great question. You if you buy something, will it ship out there?

SPEAKER_00 1:09:23

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:25

I believe so. I mean, I I I I don't think I've ever had anybody, you can tell you what, try. If for whatever reason doesn't work, there's a there's a uh email on my website where you can contact us at Ever Onward and it will go to me and my team. If there's an issue, we'll try and figure out a way to make that work. I I I hate that I don't have that answer, but I feel like I've had people abroad order stuff and get it. But I'm not, I I can't answer straight off. I can't answer straight off.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:49

Well, you know what, Raw, you're breaking my heart here, bud, because I've got I wanted to buy some ever onward beanies. I've got it up on the screen here. And you know what? It said sold out, but now I can actually buy one. Great. I'm gonna I'm actually this thing now.

SPEAKER_01 1:10:04

Well it's good. If they're selling, they're selling. If they don't come, you reach out to me directly and I'll get a case shipped to you and you can you can pass them to the rest.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:11

Well, it's the same color as our company branding, so I want to get one for the whole team. So I might actually just do that. So I'll re I'll get Mav to reach out to your team and we can take care of that. Cool. Raw, awesome, dude. Thank you so much for uh for being on the show, dude. It's been an absolute privilege and an honor. Thank you to all of you online. You always support the show. Without you, this wouldn't be possible. So we'll see you again soon, rather. Cheers, guys, bye. Thanks for listening to the MapRound show, guys. Don't forget, you can catch me on all social media platforms for the latest updates, news, and a show of history. So if you've been catching us on the podcast, please head on over to our YouTube channel and pound that subscribe button. It would be great to catch the video version there. And if you want a free copy of my number one Amazon best-selling book, You're in a game for free right now today, you can grab that on mapgroundshow.com forward slash ebook. Ever wanted to become a best-selling author? Well, I'm in the influence business and I work with business owners and CEOs and business leaders to help them scale their influence. And we do this as a team by helping you to become a best-selling author, source-after speaker, and industry influencer in only 30 days. My team and I have developed a system that delivers a best-selling book and a launch campaign 300% faster and a 50% less cost than anyone else in North America. This system is incredibly efficient. One of my clients, haiku, went from a 2% share of voice globally to an 11% share of voice globally in only seven days. If you'd like more information, head on over to showworksmedia.com for more. That is showworkswithinx.com. Ever wanted to become a best-selling author? Well, I'm in the influence business and I work with business owners and CEOs and business leaders to help them scale their influence. And we do this as a team by helping you to become a best-selling author, sort-after speaker, and industry influencer in only 30 days. My team and I have developed a system that delivers a best-selling book and a launch campaign 300% faster and a 50% less cost than anyone else in North America. This system is incredibly efficient. One of my clients, haiku, went from a 2% share of voice globally to an 11% share of voice globally in only seven days. If you'd like more information, head on over to showworksmedia.com for more. That is showworkswithinx.com.