https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=5dDmDiPLxfI
So you went to the seals and tell us about that a bit. It was awesome. You know, it’s your, uh, you’re making more money than you could ever figure out to do with. You know, I’m 19 years old and I am the richest person that’s ever existed in my mind because I’m making whatever it is, but however many thousand dollars every two weeks. And you know, my expenses were nothing. And so you’re just totally stoked. You’re getting, you got a great job. You’re working out, you’re shooting machine guns, you’re blowing things up. You’re hanging out with a bunch of bunch of other guys that like to blow things up and you, you, you can fight each other at the drop of a hat and then you get done with a fight and you shake hands and then, and then you go eat a steak. And so you’re just in this environment and it’s perfect. It’s it’s freaking awesome. So what was it like? It was awesome. That’s what it was like. It’s funny. You read accounts of the Navy SEALs and I’ve never read it as enthusiastic an account as that account right there. And so then how long after you, what happened after you were done your Naval SEAL training? What direction did your military career take? Yeah. So I got done with SEAL training. I went to SEAL team one. It was 1991. I just missed the first Gulf war. I was all broken hearted about that because this war had happened and I didn’t know when another one was going to happen. And so what, what do you do is you train and we trained a bunch. I did a bunch of SEAL platoons, which is you form up with a group of guys, you do a training cycle together as a platoon, and then you go on deployment overseas. And when there’s no war going on, you go to other countries and you work with foreign nationals and you train them on the skillsets that we have and learn some stuff from them. And then you come back and you do it again. And then eventually from there, I went into a, where I became a trainer at SEAL team one and taught the tactics to the SEAL platoons that were now training to go on deployment. And I did that for a couple of years. And then I got picked up for a commissioning program and became an officer in the SEAL teams, which moved me up into a leadership position. And then I did a couple of deployments as a, as a young SEAL leader. Then I had to go to college. The Navy sent me to college. Cause in order to be an officer in the, in the Navy, you have to go to college and I hadn’t been to college. Where’d you go? I went to the university of San Diego. You went to the university of San Diego. What did you take there? I was an English major. All right. So you finished college and then what happened? You’re not going to ask me why I was an English major. Why were you an English major? I thought when he hears English major, he’s going to say, wait a second. Here you are. This guy talking about machine guns and blowing things up. What in God’s name are you going to go study English? I have to say that that thought did pass through my mind. Okay. Why was I an English major? I was an English major because believe it or not, when you’re in the SEAL team, and especially when you’re in any officer position, you have to write and read all the time. So when one of your troops does something and they deserve some kind of recognition for that, you have to write them an award. And if the award is written, well, there’s a much better chance that it’ll actually be given to the person that you’re writing it for. You have to write evaluations for your troops and the evaluations that you write are going to be written by the person that you’re writing it for. What you write is how your troops are judged so that they can be promoted. On top of that, if you want to go do a mission, you have to write a concept of operations, which is a document, which is five, six, seven, eight pages long that you send up the chain of command that then they scour through and see if they’re going to prove your mission or not. You know, that’s so insanely important. You know, I mean, one of the things, I did a talk at Harvard four years ago and. I pointed out two things to the students in the audience. One was that. A tremendous amount of civilization and effort had gone into producing the institution that they were now part of and that everyone who was part of that institution was hoping that they would come there and learn everything they possibly could that was relevant and important and that they would be the best possible people they could be and they would go out in the world and do as much good as they possibly could. That was the essential mission of the enterprise. And that was really the case. And also that learning to write in particular was going to make them more powerful than they could imagine. And a number of students came up to me afterwards and said, I really wish someone would have said that to us when we first came here. And it’s the writing part of that. I kind of got obsessed with that when I was working as a professor and I’m working on a piece of software right now to help, which will launch soon to help people write because what I observed in my own career and it’s so interesting, the parallelism is so interesting, but not surprising is that nothing can stop you if you can write. And it’s for the reasons you just laid out. It’s like when you write, you make a case for something, whatever it happens to be. And if you make the best case, well, then you win and you get whatever it is that you’re aiming at. And so, you know, you said, maybe that’s why I didn’t ask you why you went into English, I guess that might’ve been the reason is that the utility of learning to write is so self-evident to me that it could pass by without question. But it’s also interesting to think about how it fits into this broader, well, let’s say at least partially military slash strategic way of looking at things. You know, you describe the intense relationship between marshaling your arguments properly, getting everything in order on the page and making strategic progress truly in the military sense that those things are tied together very, very precisely. And it’s obviously your ability to communicate as well. That’s that’s well, look what it’s done. You have your podcast, you have your YouTube channel, you have your books, which many of which you self-published. So that ability to communicate is it’s I just can’t understand why it’s not presented, especially not entirely, but especially to adventurous. Well, let’s say young men, we could say young people, you’re adventurous. You want to make a mark? Is you bloody well better learn how to write? Because if you learn how to write, well, then you can think and you can communicate your thoughts. So not only are you deadly strategically, you become extremely convincing and then you can go and do anything you want and no one will stop you. And that’s never told to people. And I, I, I, I don’t really understand why, you know, you hear the pen is mightier than the sword, which is just a cliche unless it’s fleshed out. But the reason you laid out the reasons perfectly. Yeah. You have to communicate what happened as well as having it had had it happen. Right. So you, you already connected the dots, but obviously not only am I having to write and present my argument, I’m also having orders being issued to me, which are written. I’m sure you’ve heard the term rules of engagement. Well, rules of engagement is a 12 page document that is in a bunch of legal E’s and I’ve got to translate that document to my troops, some of whom, you know, barely graduated high school. And so I’ve got to be able to do that. So I’ve got to be able to read and then write and be able to then communicate and, and talk to the team and brief them in a manner that they can actually understand what it is I’m talking about and what it is our mission is and why we’re doing this mission. So that was why I decided to study English when I, when I went to college and believe. So that was a conscious decision. Absolutely. It was a, and with that end in mind that it was so tell, tell me exactly what the decision was with regards to studying English. What did you know that, because it’s not, as you pointed out, it’s not self evidently the most practical of pursuits and not necessarily what you’d expect someone with a military orientation to pursue. Right. Here’s the, here’s the thought process. I want to be a good seal. The good seals that I see can communicate, they can write and they can read. That’s what I need to learn how to do. I need to learn how to do that better.