The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
547. The Movie Hollywood Didn’t See Coming... | Jocko Willink
Thu, 15 May 2025
Dr. Jordan B. Peterson sits down with Jocko Willink — decorated Navy SEAL, best-selling author, and serial entrepreneur — to explore the principles of discipline, leadership, and the relentless pursuit of meaningful goals. From parenting to entrepreneurship, from writing books to rebuilding American factories, this is a masterclass in how to live deliberately and lead effectively. Jocko shares how to recognize the problems that matter, transform them into opportunities, and cultivate the habits that compound into lasting success. Together, they trace the journey of “Way of the Warrior Kid” — from a simple idea to a major motion picture — and reflect on what it means to lead with humility, ask earnest questions, and build a life driven by purpose. Whether you're trying to straighten out your life, launch a business, or simply stay on the path, this episode is packed with hard-won insight on how to aim upward — and stay there. Jocko Willink is a retired U.S. Navy SEAL officer and decorated combat leader who commanded Task Unit Bruiser—the most highly decorated Special Operations unit of the Iraq War. After 20 years of service, including overseeing SEAL leadership training, he co-founded Echelon Front, a leadership consulting firm where he teaches battlefield-tested principles to business leaders. He is also a New York Times bestselling author of “Extreme Ownership, Discipline Equals Freedom,” and the “Way of the Warrior Kid” series, and hosts the popular Jocko Podcast.Privacy Policy: https://www.dailywire.com/privacyThis episode was filmed on April, 24th, 2025. | Links | For Jocko Willink: On X https://twitter.com/jockowillink?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor Website https://jocko.com/ Jocko Podcast https://www.youtube.com/@JockoPodcastOfficial Extreme Ownership: How Navy SEALS Lead and Win (Book) https://a.co/d/edlceXB
Chapter 1: What lessons can parents teach their children about self-criticism?
One time my daughter came home saying that she was stupid, and I said, well, why do you think you're stupid? She says, I don't know my times tables. Bad father. I hadn't taught her how to study. She literally was thinking that she was stupid. Single points of inadequacy do not indicate general incompetence.
You're not born knowing your times tables, and you're not born knowing chemistry, and you're not born knowing European history. You have to read about it and you have to study it.
You want to take that self-criticism and narrow it to the point where it turns into a strategy for progress.
Okay, so you wrote this book, The Way of the Warrior Kid. So there's a guy, he has kids, and one day he walked into his kids' rooms and his kids were doing push-ups. And he said, what are you doing? So they showed him this book that they read called Way of the Warrior Kid. He picks up the book and says, I got to make this into a movie. Oh, really? Oh, okay.
Yeah, I don't know how much you care about Hollywood behind-the-scenes stuff.
Well, let's hear the story. Hello, everybody. I had the privilege of sitting down today with someone who's really become a friend, Jocko Willink, former Navy SEAL, a serial entrepreneur. And we had a chance to dive into the practices of his successful and adventurous life. And we talked about two broad categories of topic, both of which are a great practical utility.
One of them was an analysis of where you find ideas and opportunities. How do you determine where to look for what might change your life? How do you pursue your interests? How do you pay attention to what bothers you? How do you turn the problems that bother you into opportunities? How do you pursue the things that compel you so that they are the gift that keeps giving?
How do you generate a life of abundance around you conceptually and practically? And Jocko's done that in a multitude of ways. We used his latest foray into a new entrepreneurial domain as a case study, so to speak. He's got a new movie coming out, The Way of the Warrior Kid, and we discussed
why he wrote that book, what problem he thought he was solving, how that morphed into a sequence of publishing opportunities, how that then transformed into the opportunity to make a movie, how he made that work properly. We also talked about leadership a lot and what leadership is and how it is that you configure yourself and the way that you interact with the world so that you can become a
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Chapter 2: How did 'Way of the Warrior Kid' become a movie?
So tell me, list out your businesses, if you would. And so let's go through that a little bit, and then we can talk about where you're pursuing all of those.
Yeah, so I would say the big three, I'll call them, the big three for me anyways, is I have a leadership consulting company called Echelon Front, and we work with scores of companies around the country and around the world, and we train them and help them with their leadership.
Yep.
And then I have a food supplement company called Jocko Fuel, and we make clean supplements for people, whether they need protein or whether they need energy or hydration, we got you covered. And so that, again, we're growing very rapidly and we've been growing very rapidly for many years now. And then the final one is a clothing and apparel company called Origin USA, which,
made basically everything that I'm wearing right now, from my boots to my jeans, my T-shirt. The shirt is made by another company called Hooli, which is another friend of mine, Asil, who makes golf shirts. I'm not a golfer, but he makes golf shirts. And Origin, at Origin USA, we make everything 100% in America with American-made materials.
So the cotton on these jeans, the zippers, the threads, the boots, the leather, everything that I'm wearing from Origin USA is from... materials that are made here, grown here. And then we actually have factories in Maine and factories in North Carolina where we cut and sew.
Yeah, I think the last time we talked, you told me about reestablishing some of these factories and reopening them.
Yes.
So it'll be fun to cover that. So those are the big three. What else? Because that's not enough, you know?
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Chapter 4: How does collaboration work in the movie-making process?
straightforwardly is you had a problem which was well what am I going to get my kids to read and your experience was you went to the library the bookstore and you couldn't find anything now you could imagine someone brooding about that you know the culture's gone to hell it's like how the hell can we have nothing but like wimpy pirate novels and it's just another indication that we're going to perdition in a handbag and and you know and to get resentful and bitter about that but your
perspective was that absence is an opportunity. And so this is a good thing for people to know. If something bothers you, there's a billion things that could bother you, and not everything does. And so then you might ask, well, why does that thing bother you when some other thing that's equally bad doesn't?
And as far as I can tell, the answer to that is because if it bothers you, that's your problem. And you might think, I don't want to have a problem. It's like, that's because you don't know that problems and opportunities are the same thing.
So if a problem's crying out for you, to you, then it could well be that your proper destiny is to address that problem, in which case it's an immense opportunity. And you saw that, exactly that. Oh, look, there's an absence in the marketplace. Well, that's a good discovery, an absence in the marketplace, especially if you're right about
And so that's what you did, and then you got a movie out of it. So that's a pretty good deal. And that's independent of its eventual success as a movie, because even if it... lands at any of the levels of success it could land at, you got to make a movie. And so that's pretty good. And God only knows what you learn doing that. So there's no loss in that, right? There's just gain.
There was an interesting thing that I realized during this whole thing. And it is related to what you just said. So- For many years, I have told people that if you have an idea and you don't execute on it, your idea doesn't mean anything. Ideas are a dime a dozen and it doesn't really matter. And what I realized in making this movie is that I was actually wrong. Okay.
Because if an idea, it's worthless if you don't execute on it. I get that. but the actual idea that If you have an idea, if you have an idea and it's good, you can't even put a price tag on that thing. And that's why when you look at Hollywood, Hollywood makes a bunch of, what are they called? Like reruns of the same movies, right? There's a reason for that.
They have all this money to throw at ideas and they just go, well, you know what? Make the superhero movie again, make the space movie again. They just make the same movies often over and over again. And I realized that these, you know, if you have a really good idea, you have to execute on it. You have to do something with it.
Because if you don't, it's like a mortal sin not to execute on a good idea. Well, it's a revelation, a good idea. It's a gift. It's grace. Where does it come from? That's why I was kind of very curious. That's exactly right. I know the answer to that. I look at it like... you know, they know what molecules are in an amoeba, right? We know what chemicals, but we can't make an amoeba.
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