464: Default Aggressive. Combat Ready Leadership From Estonia. With Estonian Spec Ops Soldier, Remo Ojaste

Summary

Jocko Podcast Episode 464: "Default Aggressive. Combat Ready Leadership From Estonia. With Estonian Spec Ops Soldier, Remo Ojaste"

Hosts:

• Jocko Willink
• Echo Charles

Guest:

• Remo Ojaste, Estonian Special Operations Soldier and Co-founder of Combat Ready

Release Date: November 13, 2024

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1. Introduction to Echelon Front's Field Training Exercise (FTX)

Timestamp: 00:00 - 04:36

Jocko Willink introduces the episode by discussing Echelon Front's FTX, a simulated combat event designed to evaluate and train leadership under chaotic and high-pressure scenarios. Participants from diverse backgrounds—including finance, energy, law enforcement, military, sales, and construction—are given rudimentary tactical training and tasked with missions such as urban combat operations, hostage rescues, and building clearances. The primary objective of FTX is not just tactical proficiency but observing how individuals respond to extreme stress, leadership challenges, and team breakdowns.

Notable Quote:
"The training is not for the tactics of the training. It's for leadership."
— Jocko Willink at 02:15

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2. Discovering Estonian Special Operations Excellence

Timestamp: 04:36 - 07:31

During an FTX event, Jocko observes two Estonian Special Operations soldiers performing exceptionally amidst the chaos, remaining calm and effectively leading their team. Intrigued by their performance, Jocko consults with JP, the program director, who reveals that these men are Remo Ojaste and his colleague—experienced Estonian SEALs who have served in Afghanistan. Recognizing their alignment with Echelon Front's leadership principles, a partnership is formed between Echelon Front and Combat Ready, an Estonian company dedicated to teaching similar leadership and discipline principles across various sectors.

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3. Remo Ojaste’s Early Life and Background in Estonia

Timestamp: 07:31 - 12:38

Remo Ojaste shares his personal history, providing context about Estonia's geopolitical struggles, including its persistent contention with Russia and its history of occupations. Born in 1989, Remo grew up during a transformative period as Estonia regained its independence through the "singing revolution." His parents were involved in small-scale illegal activities in the early 90s to survive the economic instability post-independence. Remo also discusses his family's military background, with his grandfathers having fought on both sides during World War II, symbolizing resilience and strength.

Notable Quote:
"They were like super hard people... just hard people doing hard things, living through tough times."
— Remo Ojaste at 11:03

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4. Transition to Military Service and Training

Timestamp: 12:38 - 35:55

Remo discusses his mandatory conscription into the Estonian military, detailing the rigorous boot camp that emphasized discipline, physical fitness, and basic soldiering skills. He contrasts his experiences with the outdated Soviet-style training still prevalent in some units, highlighting the challenges of transitioning to modern, NATO-aligned military practices. Through persistent effort and high performance, Remo advanced to become a squad leader, receiving advanced training from seasoned veterans returning from Afghanistan. This period solidified his leadership capabilities and prepared him for real combat scenarios.

Notable Quote:
"By the end of the three months, I lost all of my weight and I was in shape."
— Remo Ojaste at 35:10

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5. Deployment to Afghanistan and Combat Operations

Timestamp: 35:55 - 87:03

In 2013, Remo was deployed to Afghanistan with his unit, engaging in operations aimed at enhancing local security and training Afghan forces. He recounts his first mission where his team faced unexpected gunfire, necessitating swift communication and adaptation under fire. Despite the chaos, Remo credits his rigorous training and leadership principles for their ability to maintain composure, execute their duties effectively, and avoid casualties.

Notable Quote:
"It was the first time in a contact... I have no idea what's happening. But our training paid off because it was all cover move, keeping things simple."
— Remo Ojaste at 58:37

Remo also touches on the high operational tempo and the challenges of maintaining effectiveness without sufficient rest, drawing parallels to his experiences in the Estonian Special Operations Force.

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6. Founding and Building Combat Ready

Timestamp: 87:03 - 141:35

After his military service, Remo co-founded Combat Ready with the mission to translate military leadership principles into civilian applications. Leveraging his combat experience and the principles taught by Echelon Front, Combat Ready began offering leadership training, initially facing challenges in establishing credibility and securing clients. Through persistence, strategic relationship-building, and adapting military doctrines to business contexts, Combat Ready gained traction. Remo highlights key milestones, such as winning significant contracts, expanding their reach across Europe, and integrating feedback to refine their training programs.

Notable Quote:
"We got something. We know what we're doing. We do the right things for the right reasons."
— Remo Ojaste at 110:00

Combat Ready emphasizes principles like extreme ownership, decentralized command, and prioritization, which resonate across various industries and foster effective leadership.

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7. Expanding Influence and Implementing Leadership Principles

Timestamp: 141:35 - 174:25

Combat Ready's growth is attributed to its ability to adapt and implement tested military leadership principles in diverse settings, from corporate environments to youth organizations. Remo discusses the development of structured training programs, including a belt system to signify proficiency levels, and the importance of repetition and muscle memory in ingraining these principles. The partnership with Echelon Front and continuous iteration based on client feedback have been pivotal in establishing Combat Ready as a credible and impactful training organization.

Notable Quote:
"If you do things what's written in the book, you can't go wrong."
— Remo Ojaste at 158:37

Additionally, Combat Ready's foray into publishing, including localized versions of leadership books for Estonian audiences, underscores their commitment to cultural adaptation and accessibility of their teachings.

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8. Conclusion and Future Aspirations

Timestamp: 174:25 - End

In the closing segments, Remo reflects on the journey of Combat Ready, emphasizing the importance of authentic leadership and the impact of disciplined practices both in military and civilian realms. He underscores the company's mission to transform Estonian and European culture by empowering individuals with robust leadership skills. The episode wraps up with high praise from Jocko for Remo's dedication and the potential of Combat Ready to continue making significant contributions to leadership development.

Notable Quote:
"The ultimate goal is to change Estonian culture, help people, help the youth... to make Europe great."
— Remo Ojaste at 167:54

---

Key Takeaways:

• Leadership Under Pressure: Combat Ready's FTX simulates high-stress environments to train and evaluate leadership capabilities.
• Cultural Resilience: Estonia's turbulent history has shaped individuals like Remo, instilling resilience and adaptability.
• Military to Civilian Transition: Remo successfully translates military leadership principles into effective civilian training programs.
• Strategic Growth: Through partnerships, strategic relationship-building, and iterative improvements, Combat Ready has established itself as a leader in corporate and leadership training.
• Continuous Learning: Emphasizing principles like extreme ownership, decentralized command, and prioritization fosters effective and adaptable leadership across various sectors.

Final Thoughts:

Remo Ojaste's journey from an Estonian Special Operations soldier to a transformative leader in the civilian sector exemplifies the profound impact of military training on personal and professional development. His dedication to instilling disciplined leadership principles continues to empower individuals and organizations, underscoring the universal applicability of these timeless strategies.

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For More Information:

• Combat Ready: combatready.ee
• Remo Ojaste on Instagram: @RemoOjaste
• Jocko Podcast: jockopodcast.com

Transcript

[Jocko Willink]

This is Jocko, podcast number 464 with Echo, Charles, and me, Jocko Willink. Good evening, Echo.

[Echo Charles]

Good evening.

[Jocko Willink]

So we do an event at Echelon Front. It's called the FTX Field Training Exercise, and it's a simulated combat event. And what we do is we take a bunch of people from very. A wide variety of backgrounds from, like, the finance world, the energy world, just any type of business. We also will have usually some law enforcement, we'll have some military, but then it'll be salespeople and construction people, whatever. And we give them some, like, rudimentary. Rudimentary tactical training. And then we put them into missions, like I said, simulated combat, usually in urban combat. So there's houses and buildings that need to be cleared and people that need to be communicated with and hostages that need to be rescued, and the missions are chaotic. We'll put them out with some task, and then we'll. We've got role players. The role players are, you know, former SEALs or former Marines or former army guys. And so they'll be really good. And they'll get hostile, and there's smoke and there's gunfire and there's screaming and there's yelling and confusion. And we'll watch this group. And it's. It. The training is not for the tactics of the training. It's for leadership. It's to see how people respond in these chaotic situations. And it's what these people get to experience. And what they get to experience is a massive amount of pressure. Their emotions are running high. They get, like, tunnel vision. They get adrenaline overload. They panic, they yell and scream. And what we get to see and what they get to see is like a comprehensive breakdown of a team. And they get to learn from that. And each individual will feel that. And everyone's gonna struggle. Just about everyone will go into some kind of brain lock at some point, like, where they just freeze up. Some people just go full meltdown at some point, and it's. It's hard. And there's been some. Some. Some of the initial runs that we do. Some of the initial iterations can be so chaotic and the people can perform so poorly that a few times I've been. I'll catch myself wondering it, is this too much? Like, are we doing things that no human can actually handle? And sometimes I'll be thinking that. And while I was at one of these events, one of these field training exercises at Echelon Front, and I was watching these two gentlemen, these two guys, and they're just unfazed and there's chaos and there's mayhem, and there's people freaking out and yelling and screaming and not knowing what to do, and deer in the headlights, the whole nine yards. And these two dudes are just calm, cool, and collected, but also engaged. They're making things happen. They're not just doing their assigned jobs, what they're picking up. They're. They're taking security, they're leading little teams. And I'd actually never seen anyone perform like this at one of our FTX's. And here's these two guys, and I knew something was going on. So I walk over to JP because jp, you know, he's running the whole FTX program, and they have bios on everyone. I was like, hey, jp, what's up with these freaking two guys over here that are, like, holding security cover and moving, making this happen? And he's.

[Remo Oyaste]

He.

[Jocko Willink]

He smiles and he's like. Those guys are Estonian special operation soldiers, and they deployed to Afghanistan. One's an officer, the other one's a senior enlisted guy. And they actually follow the principles that we teach. And we talked to him about it. I looked at these guys, I was like, yeah, they sure do. And that right there was the beginning of a relationship that we now have with these two men and their company. Their company is called Combat Ready, and Combat Ready is a company in Estonia, and they represent Echelon Front, and they partner with Echelon Front in Europe. They teach the same principles that we teach, and they help leaders in every realm, in every different type of business, lead and win. And it's an honor to have one of those men, Remo Oyesta. Actually, it's Ramo Oyesta here with us tonight to share his experiences and lessons learned. Remo, thanks for joining us. Oyesta. I got it right the second time.

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah, almost.

[Jocko Willink]

Oh, let's hear it for real, then.

[Remo Oyaste]

Remo Oyaste.

[Jocko Willink]

So you have to roll the R, huh? Remo Oyesta.

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah. I don't know. Yeah, some. Some people just say Remo, I don't really care.

[Jocko Willink]

Style points with the R. Sure. All right, let's. Let's talk about Estonia real quick. Give us the basics. The basics on Estonia. It's located on the Baltic Sea. You got what? Sweden to the west, Latvia to the south. Popular. It's pretty small population.

[Remo Oyaste]

Yep. 1.3 million.

[Jocko Willink]

1.3 million.

[Remo Oyaste]

Finland to the north, Big bear to the east.

[Jocko Willink]

Yeah, and a big bear to the east. So you're. You got Russia as well. And you've had to Contend with Russia for your whole existence. It's a pretty flat place. Like, what's the highest peak? It's like several hundred feet or something.

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah, it's 380 meters. I don't know how much that didn't feed. It's a hill.

[Jocko Willink]

Yeah, that is a hill. A bunch of lakes and islands.

[Remo Oyaste]

Yep. We have over 2,000 islands. Latvians have zero, so we won.

[Jocko Willink]

People speak Estonian. That's the language there. You've had a bunch of wars there, and you've been occupied and reoccupied multiple times. You fought the Estonian War of Independence against the Soviets and the Baltic German forces, 1918-1920. In 1940, there was Soviet occupation. In 1941-1944, there was German occupation. Some Germans fought or. Sorry, some Estonians. Many Estonians fought for the Germans against the Soviets. Of course, there was people that fought against both the Nazis and the Russians. In 1944, Estonia was absorbed into the Soviet Union and then spent many years as part of the Soviet Union. And then 1988 to 1991, you aggressively had what's known as the singing revolution.

[Remo Oyaste]

Yep. People sang themselves free.

[Jocko Willink]

How'd that work?

[Remo Oyaste]

Well, I mean, it was a good setup, I would say. And then it just was a matter of people starting singing. Like, there was a Baltic chain from one side of Estonia until Lithuania. So many hundred kilometers, people were just holding hands and just showing that we want to be free. And then there was a singing square, and people went and sank. So I would say it's like more of, like a symbol when things started to go in the right direction. But that was one of the times when we were able to start singing Estonian songs. People went crazy in that sense. We gathered, like, I don't know, 100,000 people. So. Yeah.

[Jocko Willink]

And luckily at the time, I mean, the Soviet Union was falling apart, so it was kind of really good timing and then showing that. That the Estonian people wanted to be free. And that's very interesting that the songs were suppressed. These old songs were suppressed. And so then they came back and caught the spirit. Now, you were born in the Soviet. Yeah, in the Soviet Union, I guess. 89 in 1989.

[Echo Charles]

Yep.

[Jocko Willink]

And, well, so what was. What'd your parents do?

[Remo Oyaste]

So they. They pretty much worked. So mother was like. Like most of the time, like, in Soviet area, everyone had to go to some sort of a skill school. My mother went, I think, learned some gardening. Gardening. So they were, like, from the countryside. My father, I actually have no idea what he learned, but eventually he was a builder so he did all of that stuff initially during the Soviet times. Yeah, my parents did some illegal stuff as everyone in the 90s. So I remember that we were selling vodka or like illegal vodka, cigarettes, gas. So we were like living next to a Russian airfield. Like there was a military base there. And as you understand, like, at that time, everyone was corrupt. So I don't know how my mother figured out or my father figured out that, hey, we could actually get the gas with a good price from the soldiers. Then I know that they hold it in a. Like a small. Like a small building and then they sold gas out of it to people. So, like, everyone was doing it pretty much, and we were able to kind of gather a lot of resources, but that was what everyone was doing. Everyone was stealing, everyone was trying to get by. So everyone pretty much got after it.

[Jocko Willink]

And so that. So that was in the 90s. That was after.

[Remo Oyaste]

It was in the beginning of 90s. Yeah.

[Jocko Willink]

Okay. So it was like freedom. And we were trying to figure out what to do with all this freedom.

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah. So. Because as I remember. So it was more maybe in the middle of the 90s, but yeah, it was wild. I mean, in the beginning when we got independent, like, everyone, like just tried to figure out what to do because now you have this freedom. And there was a lot of opportunity in that sense to do a different type of things. And people just started doing whatever was in front of them and they just made the thing happen. My mother, she also, like, I don't know, she was a scammer in the best way. Like, she had some, like, leather friends. So you're sending like, postcards.

[Jocko Willink]

Oh, yeah, we call that a pen pal.

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah, pen pal. Yeah, exactly. So she, for whatever reason had a pen pals in Germany. I don't know how that ever happened, but. And then as they didn't have much money because like, we. We did all of that illegal stuff and getting money. But my father liked gambling, so he went out and like destroyed all the fortunes. So to say so it. And then eventually my mot. Like there was like, whatever. Like there was no money. So there was like a lot of, like this, I know. Piece of paper. You go there and you get the ratio of milk or whatever. So. And she figured out that, hey, I'm going to collect German marks, like German money. And she wrote to the pen pel. Or pen pel.

[Jocko Willink]

Pen pal.

[Remo Oyaste]

And like, hey, I don't have this type of money in my collection. And then those pen pals started sending her money and obviously she didn't collect them. So she just made those into money. And that's how we get by during hard times. So. Yeah, you have to innovate a lot. So.

[Jocko Willink]

And then what about. Was there any military history in your family that you knew about?

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah, so not in like, I didn't like, see anyone. There was like one uncle who went to the military, but my both grandfathers or great grandfathers actually they both stayed in the Second World War I fought on the. Both sides. Like, we were really proud that they killed Soviet guys. Then we were proud that they killed Nazis. So nobody really knows what happened. It's just legends about them. But the fact is that they stayed there and all the grandparents, they lived through the Second World War. They lived through the. The portion or. Yeah, departing them, sending to Siberia. So they. They were like super hard people. Like. Like my grandfather, he eventually, like, I think he lived until like 70 and he was like farming or treating animals. And like when he was like 70, he got a stroke during. While he was like farming. Then what he did, he just sat down for five minutes and then continued. And that was the like, attitude of those dudes. Like, just hard people doing hard things, living through tough times. So.

[Jocko Willink]

So your uncle. So he must have been in the Soviet army?

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah, there was one. One uncle who went to Soviet Army. He like. Yeah. So how. Like every man had to. During Soviet time, every man had to serve Soviet army, either two years in the army or three years in the navy. And usually the people were sent very far away from their home. And in the case of my uncle, so there was. In the city where I lived, there was like a restaurant. My father had a birthday. And as there was no possibility to sing any Estonian songs because pretty much like you had local people and some of them were on a communist site. So they were like looking on. Okay, who is here who doesn't like this system? And then they're rats. Yeah.

[Jocko Willink]

And that's the way that these communist system works, is that there's rats that live amongst the people.

[Remo Oyaste]

Exactly. And then there was a birthday and obviously they like drinking, so they started drinking. And then at some point, my uncle started singing Estonian like songs and about freedom, about our land, about our sea. And then just one dude didn't like it. And then whoever the rat was, he said, I know where you will going. You will be going to Afghanistan. And that's where we. Where he went. What he specifically did there, I have no idea because every time when we had conversation with him, he kind of talked like he was part of Every legend, every legend that was out there, he was there. He was the one who survived. Everyone else in the platoon was like cut and their throats were cut. He was the one who survived. And there was sniper shooting. He survived again, like he had all of those stories. And once there was like a really funny thing. We went to my countryside with one of my friends who wasn't in the military, and we were doing some stuff over there. And then they went to the barn and obviously he liked vodka, so they started drinking there. And I was just doing some. Something else. And eventually I went back. What the hell are they doing? I went there like, they were crying. I was like, okay, what's going on? And then I started listening.

[Jocko Willink]

These are friends like one of yours?

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah, one of my friends are now.

[Jocko Willink]

Crying, but they were talking to your uncle.

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah, exactly like, and they also crying. I was like, what are you guys trying about? It's like, what the fuck? And they're like, yeah, I was in the situation where everyone was killed. I was survived. Then I saw dead babies. And like there was like this tremendous stories which you can see it's total. But this guy didn't understand, so he believed it. So he was a great storyteller. And he was like just talking all the legends and this guy was crying. I was like, okay, let him enjoy it. And next day I told him, hey, hey. All of what you heard is bullshit. So yeah, that was the connection with the military.

[Jocko Willink]

Yeah, that is kind of crazy. And then you think about, I mean, it's a little fast forward, but your uncle, at least in some aspect, fought against the jihadists over in Afghanistan who were at the time supported by America.

[Remo Oyaste]

Absolutely. Yeah.

[Jocko Willink]

And then fast forward, however many years you were over there fighting against the jihadists who were no longer supported by America. As a matter of fact, you were, you were fighting with the Americans. So.

[Remo Oyaste]

So we had a couple, a couple of guys who actually worked fought on the Soviet time, and then they were still in Eastern army, and then now they've fought on the NATO side. So we have those dudes as well. And those are like really tough guys. Like the, like everyone went to the army and it was hard, like, because there was like a lot of beating up. There's a lot of figuring out how to survive. So all of the people who went through it, they either broke or break or they came out pretty tough. So. Yeah, yeah.

[Jocko Willink]

The Russian army is, for lack of a better word, is just straight like tyrannical abuse of the soldiers. It's like a prison that's what they do. Yeah. As you're growing up, I know you were telling me that you had like grandparents in the countryside and grandparents in the city. So you got a little bit of both worlds.

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah, so, yeah, I had like an awesome childhood in that way that like, on the countryside there was like nine children. So like, if you go there, like, there's no rules because those grandparents, they utilize decentralized command, as we say. Like, everyone has to get by themselves. So I went there. There's no rules. You can do whatever you want. You can go out hiking, you can go wherever you go, do other stupid things. Now when you go to city, you had to be at home by 8, like morning. You had to wake up at certain time. So there's like two opposite words. One was like, super disciplined. Otherwise, like, total freedom. So I saw the dichotomy there a lot and. But it was both good sides. Like, I. My grandfather, who was on the city side, like, he was the. He was the man. Like, he was really someone to look up to because he. When he was deported to Siberia, then obviously, like, he took ownership of everything. He didn't blame, like, he went there. Oh, it sucks. So what do we do now? We started building life here. So they started building houses where they could live. And eventually he started doing sports. And then there was like this story where like, at least based on what his friends, like were saying during. On his funeral, that like, we were walking in Siberia and then we are just hearing someone cursing in Estonian in a garage somewhere. Like, what the hell is that? Someone is cursing in Estonian here. And then they went there and there was one dude who was fixing his bike and just going at the edit with the. With curses and then said, what are you doing here? I'm just fixing my bike here. I want to like, I'm going to the competition. So like, okay, we. We have actual club here. Maybe you can join and said, yeah, okay, let's. Let's do it together. You're Estonians. No problem. And eventually what happens that he became the Far East Siberian champion in. In bike riding. Like, he had full, like box full of gold medals. Then he. When he returned to Estonia after, there was a possibility to go back home at some point, like when you did your time and then he became skiing champion of Estonia. Then someone gave him a gun. And then he was skiing and shooting. He became a champion of that. So whatever he did, he became a champion. And then eventually when he retired, he worked 40 years in the factory driving a forklift. And that's Kind of like that bizarre world worked. Like, people did the amazing things and then they came in and just did one thing.

[Jocko Willink]

That's the standard, the kind of a holdover from the Soviet Union, where that's your job, that's your life, this is what you're doing.

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah, absolutely. And they were like, they had a lot of money, but there's nothing to do with money. Like, there's nothing you can do. You can buy. There's nothing to buy, but you have a lot of rubles. Like, awesome. What should we do with it? Nothing.

[Jocko Willink]

And then for you, growing. So where were you living when you're actually, like, the rest of the year, it's not summertime, you're just going to school, you're with your parents. What was that? Yeah, where was that?

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah, so I was living in the. In a age of the city. And like, we had a studio apartment, one room, one kitchen. Like, everyone was living in one room. So I only. I didn't have any brothers or sisters. So we made it happen in that sense. But that was a tiny place because government was giving apartments to people and that's what we got, I guess. And then. So, yeah, from there on, like, my parents kind of put me. Or my mother wanted me to learn English, so she put me to a school where it supposedly was harder. Like, I have always said that I'm not special at all, but apparently there was some tests and for every reason, I passed some of them. And then I got into the class where, like, the language was the main thing. We had to learn English in the second grade, in the fourth grade. German, I don't know. Russian in the sixth. And in the, like, high school, you get to get France or French. I knew any. None of those languages.

[Jocko Willink]

The only one that stuck is English.

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah, only.

[Jocko Willink]

What about Russian?

[Remo Oyaste]

Like, I understand some of it, but if you don't practice it, you, like, lose it. But yeah, I can handle it. But I couldn't have, like, real conversation. Like, we can't. We couldn't do this. Not at all.

[Jocko Willink]

What about. What about sports?

[Remo Oyaste]

So, yeah, I liked sports. So my father, like, my grandfather was a sportsman. My father was a sportsman. Like, obviously he was also doing some sports and he was pretty successful on a, like a city level. But I guess he found drinking at some point and crime. So that was his way out from the sports. So. But he put me to play basketball, soccer. So I started always, like, with the team sports. And I really enjoyed it because I know for the whatever reason, I always loved when there was A lot of people and we can compete with each other and when we do something together, we win. So. But the problem with that was always that every summer I was sent to the countryside so there was no access to anything. So I kind of like missed every year three months from the training. I still kind of did okay, but still there was no consistency of that. So I liked the sports. I did some. What's the called? Like, like running. Running, not marathons, but 100 meters, 60 meters, like track and field. Yeah, all of those things. We had to compete. So I was, I was like doing that. I was like always in the top five or whatever. So yeah, that was what I did with sports. Eventually became, became like Estonian champion in basketball.

[Jocko Willink]

Basketball, yeah. Dang.

[Remo Oyaste]

13, 14. I mean like not no big deal. Then in soccer we became fourth or something like that. So every team where I like was able to be, I was somewhere in the middle, a gray mess.

[Jocko Willink]

And, and what about like educationally in school? Is there, is there. You know, in the, in the 80s and 90s in America, it was like everyone was pushing go to college, go to college. I guess they maybe still are pushing like everyone has to go to college. Everyone they shouldn't be. But at the time when I was growing up it was like, everyone needs to go to college, everyone needs to go to college. Was there that push for you guys?

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah, it was always a push from my parents because they didn't go to university. So the mainly was like that's the only way to get, I don't know, smart I guess or whatever. Even though that they were like getting after it on a entrepreneurial level and doing crime and other stuff. So that was the success. But I mean, yeah, it was always like that.

[Jocko Willink]

Like so did they just maintain like a low, low level crime where they avoided. Oh, there was different interaction with the, the mob. Yeah, they must have mob. Yeah, you have organized crime there.

[Remo Oyaste]

So my, my father definitely had something to do with them because at some point my father went and worked in Russia. So they were like bringing over, I don't know, stuff that we don't have here. They were selling those things. And I know there was some things about drugs, but those are like drunken story. So I'm not, I haven't confirmed. They were like, like they were doing all the things, whatever the things would be.

[Jocko Willink]

Somehow they gave you the impression that that's not the best path to be on.

[Remo Oyaste]

No, not really.

[Jocko Willink]

Like, oh, they didn't give you that impression?

[Remo Oyaste]

No, no, no.

[Jocko Willink]

He was just like, hey, this is.

[Remo Oyaste]

A Good regular part of life, just that was normal. Like everyone was doing it.

[Jocko Willink]

So the next door neighbors, they were also doing their scam and their deals. And so that was just how we, everyone was living at the time.

[Remo Oyaste]

Exactly. That was the, that was the word. That was like our entre. Entrepreneurship.

[Jocko Willink]

Yeah. So. So when you're going to school, are you trying hard, you're trying to get into college, that whole thing?

[Remo Oyaste]

No, no, no, no. So I mean until like 9th grade, like I was doing good because of my father. Didn't like to drink and like to party. Then was some mess at home all the time. Then I kind of like felt like, okay, I'm not to drinking at all or whatever. So my first drink was in the ninth grade and when I tasted that nectar, I never went back.

[Jocko Willink]

So wait a second, you had decided after watching your dad drink too much, you're like, I'm not drinking. Yeah, until you were 14 and then you're like, oh, I'm in.

[Remo Oyaste]

Oh yeah, absolutely. That's like my first, first time is what. Like I was straight, went to vodka and people had to like drag me to the toilet. That was the first experience. But I mean we were like, yeah. And then everything kind of started. I started to learn what it feels like or whatever and then it became cool. But my parents never figured it out because I always kept it. I was like always sneaky in some way.

[Jocko Willink]

Oh, they never figured out that you were drinking?

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah, absolutely. Like I think my mother figured out it when I was like 19. Like you're drinking like yeah, for 10 years. So yeah, so and that, that's kind of started to introduce me to that. And then eventually like, yeah, I kind of ended up in places where I hang around with older dudes. So they were cool, they were drinking and yeah, that's what I learned. I learned from their example.

[Jocko Willink]

And are you still going to school but now you're hanging out and drinking and just kind of being a juvenile delinquent is what we would call that in America.

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah, so yeah, I was drinking and then like I still get to the high school. So gymnasium. It's not like a school where you can get a, like a profession because there's like two ways like you can get the profession. I don't know, you learn to chef or you're kind of prepared to go to university. So I got to be go to the school which was like preparing to go to university, so zero skills teached. And during that time I kind of. We were so bored that we started playing cards and we had this one game where, as a. Like, at the countryside. What did the. What the. What did people do at the Soviet time? They just played cards. And then I kind of had a knack to it, or. I don't know, for whatever reason. Again, it kind of worked out for me. And then we started playing, like, okay, who gets the most wins in this game gets a box of beer. So we played one, like, quarter, and I got, like, 80 wins. Second place had, like, 36. I was like, okay, okay, I have the beer.

[Jocko Willink]

So what game were you playing?

[Remo Oyaste]

It's called let's Poetic Night.

[Jocko Willink]

We'll go with the Estonian word.

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah, exactly. I have no idea what it's in English. I don't know if that. Most likely there is a. Like, maybe spades or some. Something like that. I don't know. But it's a skill game. Like, you can read cards. You can have a strategy. So if you play with the person who understands the rules, you can beat them. Like, there is certain amount of understanding, like, how to beat the other person. But it's a. It's not like a lucky game. But eventually, like, next quarter, we figured, okay, let's do it again. But everyone understand what the results will be. So it became boring. So then I thought, okay, what could be the new game? And then I went home and figured out, hey, it should be poker. And then I brought in papers with poker rules. And then we started playing poker in, like, 10th grade at school, which is, like, legit, right? And then we, like, had this, like, coins, which everyone brought. And then we started playing it everywhere. Then eventually we bought the chip case. Then we kind of started putting in, okay, you put 25 runes. You can put, like, it's like 10 bucks and winner takes all. And then I figured that, hey, what if I cheated? Then I went into. At that time, like, as you can remember, like, the Internet was, like, really slow. So. But there was a lot of access to, like, illegal stuff. Again, like, yeah, stuff that is not available. So there was, like, access to that. And you downloaded a video of how to cheat in poker. It took, like, a week to download. Maybe, I don't know, 10 megabytes or something. But eventually when I got it, then I started looking at it and I started playing around it. I really, for whatever reason, liked it. So I became pretty good at sleight of hand. And then I went to those poker nights, and guess what? I started winning. And nobody understood why I was winning, but I was cheating. That was the reason. But then eventually, like, we ended up with those dudes too. We went to a bar and then we saw that there were some other dudes playing cards and they were already like university. I was like 16, 17. And then there was other dudes who had done it. Like they were like 21 plus. And they started playing and obviously I thought, okay, I will jump into that table. And then we started playing. And then for the next four months, every day I went to play pool, or at least that was I told to my parents. And in reality I was playing poker in the back room with some adults, continued doing cheating. I was successful in it. Nobody understood it. But then I realized also that it's a skill game and you can make money. And eventually like one thing led to another. I eventually like cashed out. Like, I don't know. In the next two years, while I was in high school, about 50€000, dang. And at that time it was worth like an apartment. So yeah, I made more money than my parents and everything like that. Just because I like card game. And eventually like, as my father had that gambling issue, I never wanted to raise that. Today I'm making money with poker because I thought that they will never believe me. But eventually I kind of like, I never ask any pocket money and like, okay, so most likely they will start thinking that I'm like selling drugs or something. I'm doing the business that they did. So eventually like I showed them the evidence that hey, it's monthly, coming in in like right way. So there is no like. And all the other guys are paying, they are university like educated, so they're smart. Makes sense. Go on. And then I just pretty much moved out and. But yeah, that's. That was pretty much what I did in high school. I just eventually, because I started making so much money, I went to school on Tuesday and I pretty much started my weekend on Thursday. And as the weekend went so long on Sunday, I never get to school on Monday. So that was pretty much my school. I really didn't go there. But I still passed all of my grades. It didn't take much to me to get like Bs and Cs.

[Jocko Willink]

So then what came after that? Did you end up going to college?

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah, because I was, I was forced. Like my mother said, hey, you have to have an education. So I said, okay, so what do you want me to learn? Like, she's like, okay, let's go and learn economics or business, finance, leadership or something like that. Like, yeah, finance management. So I get, get in there and obviously what I did I just played poker. No more poker. And then I was like sitting around like I had one like school sister from the school. She was my like, neighbor. And there was like a bunch of other girls around me who were studying hard, everything. And I was like playing poker, getting my Cs and Bs without much of effort. And they were like mad all the time because they get the same grades what I got. But I just ran through it and what kind of ended it to me was that I forgot to sign a paper which kind of gives you an extension that you can postpone your conscript service or mandatory military service after you've done your studies. So by that time, initially, as a young guy, I really like. Actually before I entered to Boker, I actually liked military stuff for whatever reason. Now as I got so much money, I was like, fuck that military stuff. I don't need it anymore. And. But then it was like, okay, I had no choice. So I decided, okay, I will go and try it after the first year because otherwise it will be harder to finish it after I do a break after the second year. So as I forgot to sign the paper, I just had to go.

[Jocko Willink]

And everyone's going. It's mandatory for everybody.

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah, absolutely.

[Jocko Willink]

So they must have it pretty down to a pretty good system of bring. How long is. How long is like the boot camp indoctrination and all that.

[Remo Oyaste]

So you, you can have two choices. Like if you, if you end up in a leadership position like a squad leader or a platoon leader, then it's 11 months. If you're like especially like a machine gunner or a driver, or actually if you're machine gunner or just a shooter, then it's nine months. So for whatever reason, again, I was sent to 11 months, which means that I'm on a course of either getting driver's license or becoming a squad leader. So. So. But the boot camp bootcamp is pretty much same. It's like three months of zach fest. That's what it is.

[Jocko Willink]

How much. How much is left over from the Soviet military or did they weed that out?

[Remo Oyaste]

Nothing. Yeah, nothing. It was like in the beginning of like 2000, but I went in like 2009 or 2008 and 9. So sorry, 2009 and 10. By that time there was nothing but the previous years like 2000. Like it was, it was stupid. Like they were like doing backflips and breaking whatever, breaking wood with their hands, jumping out from the cars that are moving, breaking their legs, screaming each other, beating each other. So that was the army initially. So, but so was that.

[Jocko Willink]

Did that kind of start to disappear as Estonia started to work with the Western?

[Remo Oyaste]

Absolutely, yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

[Jocko Willink]

It started to be unique for like, the first Americans or Brits that showed up with these freaking borderline Russian dudes that are hitting each other in the head with blocks and stuff like this.

[Remo Oyaste]

Like, the, like the transition was that the people who were in Soviet Union or in the army, they kind of became the only people who knew anything about army. So who do you take? So you put those guys in the army, but they come with the wrong mindset. And. Yeah, that's a. That's a disaster.

[Jocko Willink]

So you had a bunch of money, now you go in the army and it's a sock fest. But for some reason you like it.

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah, I mean, actually it was also, like, overweight, like maybe like, whatever. It's like 180 pounds.

[Jocko Willink]

So this is vodka and like.

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah. Good lifestyle. Yeah. Eating pizza.

[Jocko Willink]

Pizza and vodka.

[Remo Oyaste]

Playing poker. Right. So that's not a great. But at the same time, I went to MMA training. I did some jiu jitsu and stuff like that, but that really lasted only for a year. And then I had to go to the army. So in reality, I was the guy who you see in the movie who is always left behind, like in the back. And then some people have to come and push you. That was my first month.

[Jocko Willink]

What do they do? Like, let's say you. You got a person that just doesn't want to be in the army and he doesn't care. He's a conscript. He doesn't want to serve his 12 years, much less one year. Doesn't want to be there for one month. So he's just going to not try. What do they do with that guy?

[Remo Oyaste]

They will just make them do it. And pretty much they're like, there are ways out. I mean, they will figure out the fake injury, all that kind of stuff, but in reality, like, they have no choice. They just go through it. They just have to suck it up pretty much. And. Yeah.

[Jocko Willink]

So then what's your first job once you get done with your training and what you say your training was to be a squad leader.

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah. Initially just boot camp. There's no profession. You just go through the basics. You get to learn how to shoot. Maybe you should. At that time you shot like, I don't know, 30 shots in three months. So you get to know how to shoot for sure. Yeah. So then you do those, like, long hikes. So just basic soldier skills. That's what it is all about. But during that time, you get to a regime. You start waking up early, you go bed early. So you get eight hours of sleep every day. But there was, like, night drills, so it's like mayhem. And so by the end of the three months, I lost all of my weight and I was in shape. So now I was on top of it. Like, I was in top five. And I started to enjoy it for whatever reason, because, like, you do certain things and things start to happen, so it kind of makes sense. And then all of my previous memory from the childhood when I was going to the forest and playing America's Army.

[Jocko Willink]

I was like, what's America's Army?

[Remo Oyaste]

America's army had the game. I guess it's for recruiting purposes. And it was just a, like, shooting game.

[Jocko Willink]

Like a video game?

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah. Like Call of Duty.

[Jocko Willink]

Coach confirm? No idea.

[Echo Charles]

Yeah. Never heard of them.

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah, but it was.

[Jocko Willink]

It was made by the American government.

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah, absolutely.

[Jocko Willink]

And it recruited your ass.

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah. So I played 2000 hours of that.

[Echo Charles]

Damn.

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah. And then I switched that to playing poker because I already had a good attitude, discipline of playing or sitting behind the computer. But yeah, then pretty much I kind of, for every reason, like, got reminded what I felt when I was younger. And I was like, okay, fuck that university stuff. This is for me now. And then, the same dude that we. That we established combat ready with, he was already an officer. He was a company, like 2ic in a company. And he was like, legit guy, like, tall, strong. And he apparently had just passed a selection to the special Forces. But as it was such a new thing, like, nobody wanted to let go of the good guys.

[Jocko Willink]

Okay.

[Remo Oyaste]

So they, like, tried to, like, hold the people down. They wouldn't let. Let them go. But he, I know, kind of give a beep, gave a brief that, hey, there is this unit. Cool. American pictures, people with night vision that, hey, these are the best of the best. We are. They will pay you a lot of money. All of that was a lie, of course. And just the recruitment stuff. And then I went to his office and look, here, I want to try. Even though I kind of never thought that I would pass, but I was still, like, I had a huge ego that at least told me that, hey, I will try. So, yeah, that was kind of like setting me, like, on a way where, okay, if I get there, I maybe even want to be part of the army. So that's where I understood that I like it. Then I was eventually sent to the nco. So the first three months is basic soldier skills. Then the Next two months is squad leader training. And that's like an extensive, really good training. And I was fortunate because at that time we were already being in Afghanistan for, I don't know, four or five years. And we like, we have a scouts battalion which is like one of the only like battalions that actually is deployed like professional army. And so as I wasn't in engineering battalion, they were like two dudes who came back from Afghanistan and they were put to be the leaders of the NCO or the. Yeah, junior NCOs. So they came in and they started teaching us turtles. So the level of training what we got was like super high level.

[Jocko Willink]

And this was in the NCO course that you went through?

[Remo Oyaste]

Absolutely. So because they, they were like designated, there was two plus two platoons full of NCOs and they were as the commanders or responsible for each platoon. And they were really legit, they knew what they were saying. And at the same time two guys just got killed in Afghanistan. Obviously they were their friends. And now we obviously got all the good stuff from those guys because they were mad about the situation. And when we did stupid things, they remind us that this is for real. And that that kind of provided me the foundation for everything. And it was really, really high level good training.

[Jocko Willink]

And that was regular army NCO course, conscript service. And then. So let's talk about the soft Estonian soft. There was like they originally tried to form a soft element years ago under the military intelligence battalion and it didn't work out. In 1999 they created another SOG force and apparently a member of the, of the new special operations group attempted an armed robbery with his SOG weapons.

[Remo Oyaste]

Yep.

[Jocko Willink]

And they disbanded the whole unit.

[Remo Oyaste]

Yep. So yeah, there was like we have like a National Guard. So our defense is overall built in two ways. So we have the reserve army and then we have like volunteer army and the defense league is like national guard. And the first try on that was they put together people what they did pretty much they just did cool stuff. So. And whatever reason they got out of hand, they thought that they are awesome. And like as you remember everyone was doing crime. They thought that they will go and steal money from a dude. Like the dude was like, they said that there are either, I don't know which way it was, but they were like, they wanted to sell a tractor and then the dudes were supposed to come there with I don't know, 50,000 and they thought that they will ambush them and like take the money. But at that time those dudes came with guns as well, because they know that, like, doesn't make any sense when we're moving. And then one guy got shot, so they were not really special in that sense. So they. They lost. And then all of that was dismantled.

[Jocko Willink]

2002, they make another attempt to form another spec ops unit, I guess it was. And then by 2005, they had, like, a human element, which is human intelligence. They went to Afghanistan. 2005, their mission ended up in 2007 and 2008, Special Operations Task group is formed. And this is where they start getting trained by U.S. special Operations forces, by the guys over in Soccer, Special Operations Command Europe. And then by 2010, the. You guys in Estonia are actually running your own selection course. And is that when you went through.

[Remo Oyaste]

Yep, I went through it in 2010.

[Jocko Willink]

And so were your instruct. Was your course in Estonia?

[Remo Oyaste]

Yep.

[Jocko Willink]

And were your instructors Estonian instructors?

[Remo Oyaste]

Yep.

[Jocko Willink]

Was there any other. Was there Americans? Was there Brits? Was there anybody else? Just Purestonians.

[Remo Oyaste]

So it's just like a selection. Like just two weeks in hell.

[Jocko Willink]

Okay.

[Remo Oyaste]

That kind of thing.

[Jocko Willink]

Okay. So you get done with that, and then what comes after that?

[Remo Oyaste]

So then, like, first of all, you get through it. You pass it. So we had, like, 16 guys starting. Three of us passed.

[Jocko Willink]

Damn.

[Remo Oyaste]

So it's usually what was wrong with.

[Jocko Willink]

The other freaking 14 of those dudes or whatever it was.

[Remo Oyaste]

They just wanted to quit. Yeah, but it's like the groups of people are really small.

[Jocko Willink]

Like, yes, 16 dudes and three passed.

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah, well, you. You get incremental attention.

[Jocko Willink]

Yeah.

[Remo Oyaste]

You can imagine.

[Jocko Willink]

How many instructors were there?

[Remo Oyaste]

I don't know. Seven, eight.

[Jocko Willink]

There's, like, two instructors for every dude at the end.

[Remo Oyaste]

So, yeah, the. The. There was one.

[Jocko Willink]

How do they torture you?

[Remo Oyaste]

Same way as here.

[Jocko Willink]

Do they have cold water for you?

[Remo Oyaste]

Absolutely.

[Jocko Willink]

You got a bunch of lakes, everything. Thousand Lakes or whatever.

[Remo Oyaste]

Everything. Like, you get everything. Like, it's all kind of torture that you get no sleep. Like. Yeah, there are a bunch of interesting ideas. What they have, what we run. Eventually I was able to run those things myself, but yeah, so we have, like, this, like, when you fall asleep and you get caught, then there's like, this small toy from Russian area. Like, when you screw it up, it starts doing talk, and then it screws down. It stops. Now, for each time you close your eyes, you get one hour. You sit behind the table, and you have to turn it on. You let it go, and it goes.

[Jocko Willink]

For, like, 10 seconds. And then you have to do it again.

[Remo Oyaste]

And there's a camera in front of you. Who's like, watching at you. So you do that. So some people get 10 hours of that. So while other people are sleeping, you go there and you do, though, you do that. It was like tuck turning. It's a small duck, so. And then there's. We have like this dude called Toivo, who is just a, like, mannequin. Like, if you get two meters further from your battle buddy, you get that dude on your back everywhere. So there are, like, some fun things what we do with people. But yeah, it's pretty much like the green brace selection. It just. We don't have much people in terms of the participants, I think the lowest one was eight people came to the selection. And one instance, there was 21 starting. Only one passed.

[Jocko Willink]

He was a hard man.

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah. So the attrition rate is really high, but the dudes who get through are pretty good.

[Jocko Willink]

And then what's. So what do you do after that?

[Remo Oyaste]

So after that it's a, like, Q course.

[Jocko Willink]

Is it like the Q course?

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah. Even if.

[Jocko Willink]

Where did you go for that? Estonia.

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah. Initially there's like the preparation course, then we were sent to Hungaria, Hungary. Yeah, we. We did three months there. Just basic stuff. I mean, it sucked, really. And the main reason why it sucked because sadly, it was really bad quality because, like, our conscript service, especially mine, was like, really good. And the dudes that we went there, like, most of them were like, already. Some of them had already deployed. They had gone through real infantry basic training. They were winning Afghanistan. They knew how to do things. And now you end up in a place where they are going to do you another basic soldier skills. And sadly, they didn't speak really good English, so. And their teaching methods wasn't really up to speed, so it was just four hours of sleep for two months. And that if you close your eyes, it's like it's morning and the sackfest starts again. And all of this is not like. It's just. It's not physically hard, but it's. It's just mentally so hard because you're looking at just as doing stupid things for so long. We did that part, so it made us, like, strong in our head at least. So we did that and then either.

[Jocko Willink]

That or super annoyed.

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah, so we did that part that sucked, really. And then eventually, like, there was some. Some issue with Americans and the Hungarians. I don't know, whatever. It was some sort of dispute because there should be now next phase is mos, so you're learning your whatever. And then eventually it should have happened like a Team training. But the Americans didn't show up for whatever reason. And then our command decided that this is not like logical anymore because this will continue the same way as it has been. And then we were sent back and fortunate for us, a new like Sut. So small unit tactics camp started because now we. There was nothing but no nobody to send us. Because our main idea behind our overall situation was that we need to get NATO qualified and we need to go a NATO course to get the paper. So all of what we did was for papers. So we need to. Then eventually there was no people to come in Estonia to train us. So what do we do with dudes? We sent them to school. So then they sent us to the senior NCO school. But before we had like three months of free time. And what you do, you take those dudes to the forest and you just do tactics and cover, move all that kind of stuff. So pretty much half a year straight we did only the SAC fest stuff. Then you go to the NCO school. And guess what that starts with same stuff. Same stuff again. So there was, yeah, one year of like nine months of basic training and you get good. That's. That's a good part about it.

[Jocko Willink]

And that was all while you were basically waiting to go to some kind of a NATO qualified.

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah.

[Jocko Willink]

Q course of some kind.

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah.

[Jocko Willink]

And so where'd you end up doing that?

[Remo Oyaste]

So eventually, like that took us like then about nine months, I think in total. So started in 2010, coming back March from Hungary, then in August going to the school. So I think we were five months in that school. Then there's mos. Then I started learning again engineering. So I got the new mos. And then eventually you have. You can do the practice part in your own battalion. And then we were sent back and then by that time we had like old school American SF guys who were like bodybuilders.

[Jocko Willink]

Yeah.

[Remo Oyaste]

Two meters tall, like super awesome dudes. And they kind of started to do the same stuff again because then we started it again.

[Jocko Willink]

Damn.

[Remo Oyaste]

Another sut. Yeah, another MOS training, another team build up. So that's what we started again doing. But in that time, like we were the only team. So again, ratio.

[Jocko Willink]

Is there eight of you guys or something?

[Remo Oyaste]

You said something like that. Let's put it like that. That's like a small number. And then what happened is that each MOS, like me and other guy, we got one instructor. And that instructor was, I mean remember JP was his name. And he had 25 years of SOF. He was from Ranger Battalion. He had been in every conflict from whatever time until today.

[Jocko Willink]

From World War II? Yeah, pretty much just a hard old Green Beret dude.

[Remo Oyaste]

Absolutely. And then they started teaching us how to do, do explosives, how to do all the other stuff. And then eventually we had the team training and then we supposedly was ready to kind of get qualified and then we had qualifications, then we would together a team and then we kind of supposed to be ready to go deployed.

[Jocko Willink]

And your qualification ended up being engineer?

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah.

[Jocko Willink]

And did the other guys get normal?

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah, same, same, same like, like 18 bravo, like 18 Charlie, 18 echoes, all that kind of stuff. So yeah, pretty much same. Like you get different radiomen, machine gunner tactics, same stuff.

[Jocko Willink]

So now you show up, are your guys are, is, is Estonian SOF already deployed to Afghanistan when you show up there?

[Remo Oyaste]

So yeah, so pretty much when, when we got back, I think the first unit went in 2012. So Martin again, he was the first guy in Afghanistan. He was sent there to pretty much set up and figure out where we could be sent. So he had a half a year deployment like, okay, go to Afghanistan and figure out where we can go. And he went there and then he started pulling strings, started building relationships and eventually we had a province where we could actually go together with the 10 group, I think. And then the first team went there.

[Jocko Willink]

And then when did you end up going?

[Remo Oyaste]

So I ended up going in 2013. So we were like changing them out. And yeah, it was like a Lagman province, pretty much similar situation. Like there was not a lot of freedom of maneuver. Maneuver, whatever. Freedom to maneuver. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So. And it was in a, like in the mountains, it was just one valley shaped Y. We were somewhere in the middle and the local guys obviously wasn't able to accomplish much. But the first team then, they didn't start doing any da. They didn't do any fancy stuff. They just did what was needed. What they said that, hey, we need to push the bubble to create possibility to start moving. They started utilizing the local ANA and started putting checkpoint checkpoints and then they started training the local special forces. And actually in that province, the people that we were able to utilize were pretty good. Like, it's hard to tell that usually like you say it's pretty good, it's not good, but they were pretty good. And they had their EOD teams and they were like, success rate in terms of finding like IOD was 97%. So like when we went out that it was pretty good.

[Jocko Willink]

That's amazing.

[Remo Oyaste]

Obviously every day or, I don't know, once A week. Someone blew up still, but I don't know for what their reason. There could be half of the times they just blew up because they did something stupid rather than try one id. So they were able to actually establish a really good system. They were able to pass the bubble, and now there was a freedom to move. And when we got there, we pretty much now had ability to go start getting all of the dirt packs. So we had one dude whose name was Joe Dirt. And. Yeah. So we started to kind of establish rapport with locals, like the local unit. Initially, we. We kind of started training together to learn each other so that we don't shoot each other. So. And then we. When you go to the first operation, maybe one month in, maybe one and a half months, like, here is a bag. Put all of your cell phones here. You take all of the cell phones and then you tell them where we're going. And then you go out in the night in a. In a random valley with two Chinooks, and you start killing bad guys. Pretty much.

[Jocko Willink]

It's. It's interesting. You guys were. You were training for, like, four years of legitimate infantry and special operations training. You must have been very gratified when you finally got on a Chinook and flew out to go kill bad guys.

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah, it was interesting. Like, I was the guy sitting on the edge and then flying in, in the dodal darkness, we have, like, two Apaches covering for us, two Chinooks. We are going in both of them, like, I don't know, 50, 50 people. And then I'm sitting on the back. We are starting to get closer, and then I just watch out from there and see, like, tracers flying. I was like, okay, now I'm getting. I understand where I am. Then I'm. When we land, like, I didn't take any of my. What is it? The, like, the goggles that you hide. I went there. All of my eyes were full of sand, so. And then I hear, like, the Apaches are singing already. They are sending some hellfires to that mountains or whatever.

[Jocko Willink]

This is your first Alpine?

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah.

[Jocko Willink]

And are you with, like, a bunch of Afghan?

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah.

[Jocko Willink]

We had, like, how many of you guys?

[Remo Oyaste]

It was like. I think it was seven Estonians and five Americans. And then about, I don't know, 80 locals.

[Jocko Willink]

Mm.

[Remo Oyaste]

Nighttime in the middle of nowhere. And it was funny. Like, we initially were supposed to get the, like, the special forces helicopter guys, the. Whatever. They are like, 160th. Yeah.

[Jocko Willink]

Yeah.

[Remo Oyaste]

And obviously there was a higher priority somewhere, so we didn't get that and then eventually we got the regular, I guess, army guys, and they put us one click away in the middle of the valley. And then what we had to start doing is getting closer to the target area, wherever the shura was. And that was fun because we. There was like, the mountain was on that side, and there was like this ridge lines or like, yeah, this ridge lines coming down. So we went over the first one, and I was like, okay, that's fucking sucks. And you look at the locals, like, they. They have their dress on. They're just chilling.

[Jocko Willink]

AK47.

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah.

[Jocko Willink]

A few mags or whatever.

[Remo Oyaste]

And then you get on the bottom of that and you look at the next one. Holy. You go up there, you go down and you're like, next one. Then you are on top of the third one.

[Jocko Willink]

So this is your first op.

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah.

[Jocko Willink]

And you've already. You've done three.

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And then. Then by the time I was on. On the. On the. On down on the third one, my legs were so full of blood that they just didn't, like, no. No steps up. So what we did is that we did a chain and we just pulled each other up because that's how bad the legs were. Obviously. We had all the six plates in it. All the ammunition was with me. I had, like 5 kg of explosives in the back. I had everything. Only thing what I didn't have was water. So we get on top of the fourth one, and they were like, okay, we can't go further anymore because we're already dead.

[Jocko Willink]

Like, everyone's crashed.

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah, everyone's crashed. And then, like, one of, like, as I was the last guy of Estonians, there's like, other Estonians are already down there. Go and link up with them. I'll say, okay, let's go. Like, I just go down random place down the hill, and then I link up in a random corner and say, okay, other Estonians are here at least. Very good. Now we start moving. So our idea was, like, there was, like, mayhem going on. And then we had to go and confirm if we get the Joe Dirt right. We had a dude with a. Like, a mask on. We didn't know who he was. He was supposed to be the guy who was actually confirming the dude. And then we have, like, I don't know, maybe half of the Afghans with us. And then Afghans at some point said that, hey, we don't want to go first anymore. Our Zulu for our Zulu, like, team sergeant, he was like, I don't know. Third deployment in Afghanistan is this Estonian.

[Jocko Willink]

Guy or an American guy?

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah, he was in charge of the like the lead elements. Like the officers, they stayed on top and now all NCO is just going in there just to confirm. And then our guys said, okay, so Estonians go first then because we need to move, we are not going to stay here. Because I guess the Afghans, they didn't like to use their night vision or whatever. Whatever the reason was, they didn't want to go first. So the first kind of street or first kind of word is like just two like 50 meter walls, no doors, no nothing, just a corridor. It's like, oh yeah, that's a great place to go from. So yeah, we just took a leap of faith, started going, nothing happened. Then went on and on and on. Eventually get to a place where the alleged bodies were because like, I think the Apaches, they already like had killed like 11 and we just went there to pretty much confirm. So I was put in one position to pull cover and then people piled to the right and then our dudes, they found the body. And now how do you get the picture? You take out your camera and you start taking a picture. Now what happens?

[Jocko Willink]

Flash.

[Remo Oyaste]

There's a flash. Now as the flash, as the flash goes off, there is like a machine gun fire coming from a random direction. And so then the mayhem started. Like bullets are flying over my head. I have no fucking clue what's happening. Like first time in a contact, like, okay, that, that's interesting. That's an interesting feeling. So now I heard like that they say that they are in contact, contact, contact. Now there's like shots fired. But then the officers or the HQ who stayed on top of the mountain, they don't understand or they don't hear anything. So I'm like, okay, so should I be, should I become a relay now or what should I do? So I just say contact, contact, contact into my rack radio as well. So now they got it. Then the next thing, in five minutes is that, okay, now we have wounded in action. Someone is wounded. So now I have that information to relay. I will continue that. Now they are in panic on the HQ there because it's for first re loop and then, then next thing is like, okay, Apache, we have only like seven minutes left of Apache air time. So Apache would like to start shooting someone. But as the only ones who have the blinkers are Estonians and one American, then we don't know where to shoot because there are a lot of Afghans and where they are, we have no idea. So then I started like having A conversation through radio with those dudes to figure out, hey, are they in line and are they in right place? Now, at the same time, I had this amazing equipment. So we had this night vision goggles where in in front you can put a thermal sight. But if the thermal science battery goes out black, it's black. Nothing sounds awesome. So at the same time, all of that is going on and I'm like doing my job and figuring out then obviously black. Then it's like, oh, this is getting only better. Then I kind of, whatever, I ask the guy next to me to take over in terms of this position. I change my battery. I coordinate that, yes, all of the dudes are out from the way I relay that information. And then on top of me, Apache started singing towards whatever compound. After that, everything was silent. And now our team sergeant understanding that, hey, we just climb over four mountains. We have been now, I don't know, two clicks into the city in a random place where we have no idea where we are. It's our first operation. And then he decides that, hey, okay, let's just fall back. So pretty much. Who got wounded? It was one of the chirps. His fingers were shot off or something. And then we just started going back.

[Jocko Willink]

Did you get Joe Dirt?

[Remo Oyaste]

No, absolutely nothing. And then we started going back. And the dude who brought us there, he came to me. He was just there in the epicenter. Like, I have no idea where the fuck we are. Can you lead us back to the beginning? I said, I saw how fucked up he was. I said, yes, no problem. I had no idea where we are. Just starting going in one direction and figuring out the way. So I started to be appointment. So I pointed us back to that hill. We eventually somehow got to the place where we came from. We climbed up to the mountain and then we were like, so, yeah, I wonder, do we now have to climb back over all of those mountains and then get the helicopter to pick us up? Like, we would rather stay here and fight for whatever amount of days because we are not capable of doing that. And obviously then magic happened. There's like two Chinooks came. They were hovering and we were running into the Chinooks. And then we got back and I guess we had like three people captured. I don't know who they were. I have no idea what we did because it was my first time. I have no fucking understanding of what's going on. But all of those things happened and which was, like, really fun. Like, when I, like, talked about those experiences that like all the all the laws of combat were just utilized on the first operation. And why I was able to do all of those things because of our training. Like, that nine months of, like, training paid off because, like, it was all cover move. It was keeping things simple, understanding what the hell do. Become a radio man, which I have never been, relaying information, like understanding where we have to navigate back, prioritize and execute decentralized command. Like, all of those things. Sharing bottles of water, like, everything. And so, yeah, that was the first thing. It was interesting.

[Jocko Willink]

How was the debrief on this operation?

[Remo Oyaste]

So debrief was pretty fine in terms of. I don't even feel like.

[Jocko Willink]

Did you feel like a we got some shit to fix?

[Remo Oyaste]

No, I.

[Jocko Willink]

Or did you feel like you did a decent job?

[Remo Oyaste]

We did. We did like, a decent job in general. Like, because when we get there, like, we were high fiving.

[Jocko Willink]

Like, when you got home.

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah, when we got to the base. Yeah, we got the back to base. It was. I can't even remember debrief. Like, I can't remember it.

[Jocko Willink]

You were just too fired up.

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah, I guess I was like, I don't know, rushing there. But I remember first thing what I did is, like, I opened up my Coke bottle and drank that. And we were sitting with three dudes, and then the team sergeant came in. What the fuck are you doing here? Why is your gear off? Hey, maybe we have to go out now, so. Better go and get prepared. So he just pretty much vanished our dreams of relaxing here. We were, like, laying back, starting to, like, debrief how we went and, like. But he came in and he was like a hard head. Like, he was a true team sergeant from Ranger school. Yeah, that kind of video. So.

[Jocko Willink]

Hell yeah.

[Remo Oyaste]

So, yeah, he. He. He teached me and he. He made me a human. Let's put it like that.

[Jocko Willink]

So how. So that was your first op that you went on and then what was your op tempo like after that first op?

[Remo Oyaste]

No, it wasn't. It wasn't really, like, high. I mean, because mainly what we wanted to achieve is we wanted to achieve, like, our intent was to make the area safer. And pretty much all of our. I like, help the locals start doing stuff, push them out, don't go and break doors before them. So that was the kind of idea. So I think we did overall, like, I don't know, six, seven, like, huge operations. And some of them were like, we go out with thousand people. Nobody wants to mess with you. Like, nobody. So there was like, no, like, extensive.

[Jocko Willink]

Firefights, thousand people being like locals. Like, almost all locals. Like 800 locals or something like that. 900 locals?

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah, exactly.

[Jocko Willink]

Were you involved in the training of those local as well? So that's what you were doing. That was your job. Train these guys, get them ready for operations and then roll out.

[Remo Oyaste]

Exactly. And build relationships and pretty much help them with whatever they needed. So as we had, like, we. Our guys were able to speak Russian. Like, we were. We have the common enemy because they had fought against Soviets. It was much like. It's much easier to, like, bond if you have a common history. So. And our guys were, like, able to speak Russian with them. Our commanders, like, things are good. So. And that's the previous, like, unit. They did a really great job of building everything up. It was, like, pretty easy for us.

[Jocko Willink]

And you're saying that your forces, your Afghan forces were actually pretty squared away?

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah, I mean, the, the, the special forces part or the police, whether it's BRC or whatever they were called, but they were like, random. Like, every time you. Like our camp got attacked, they were shooting every direction. So. So they were still like, everyone.

[Jocko Willink]

Did you. So did you live on a camp with them?

[Remo Oyaste]

So we lived in a camp where we had the privilege of having a. I think, like, we had a battalion of Americans who were pulling security for us, and we were in the middle, in our small, small camp, and we were able to do whatever we wanted, pretty much. So we were privileged. We didn't have to pull any security. We didn't have to do much. We just. Only thing, what we had to do is figure out how to make this area safer.

[Jocko Willink]

And how. How much did your field of vision open up as you started doing more operations and now you're more aware of what's happening and maybe paying attention, like, oh, let's make sure that the helicopter puts us down in the right spot, which is always a big one.

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah, I mean, it's a crazy thing.

[Jocko Willink]

Echo, Charles. So if you and I are going to get dropped off by a helicopter, like, 30 seconds in a helicopter means we have to walk an extra six hours. Like, it's that. It's that crazy. And so you can. You can be looking at your map for reference, like, oh, there's that ridgeline. Cool. I'm going to put my map away because we're almost there. And two minutes later, you're off, like, so far off. And that's why we always would have, if we could, kilos would drop us off and then they would maintain on station, like, somewhere in the vicinity. So if we were 5km away or something. We could call them back and say like, hey, wrong spot. But in Afghanistan it's different.

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah.

[Jocko Willink]

And because if you call them back in now, you just made a huge signature. So sometimes it's like, oh, you're just going to have to deal with what you got.

[Remo Oyaste]

So from there on, I mean, we kind of went in in the night. Then we did some like 24 hour operations where we go in the night. We kind of like, I don't know, do 360 to the village, which is like huge village. Like, it was funny that we were preparing for call outs in Estonia. Like, and when we trained it, there's like one building in the middle. We gathered around and we go there. It's like, yeah, it's a city. Who are we going to call out here? So we totally had. We prepared for wrong things. So. But eventually, like, eventually, like some of the operations were like, I got assigned seven locals and it was me. And those were fun ones.

[Jocko Willink]

And what type of operation would that be?

[Remo Oyaste]

It was like, you have to pull security on the south side with those dudes and you have to be relay because other dudes will. Now locals, we go in there again, following each other or whoever we want to capture. So we tried to pull security. Now we put together in one place. Then you navigate to a random, I don't know, area. You set up an op or covering position and then you stay there pretty much and wait for others to do their operations in the middle somewhere. So but those were the fun ones. Like you go there, you have zero ways of communicating with those dudes. Just hand signals. And, but, and then in the first five minutes when you're there, like we go in dark, I have no idea where the heck I am. And all the other guys are going away, so everyone is separate. Now me with the seven dudes, I'm like, okay, I have no idea where we are. But I know that soon, in one hour there will be a little bit of light. So I will wait until the light. Then I will have a little bit better understanding of the bearings. Then I move today covering position. And then we just stay there. Then on the first, as the first light comes up, three of those dudes just go away randomly.

[Jocko Willink]

They just leave.

[Remo Oyaste]

They just leave. They go into the city. Like, that's awesome. Now they come back in like 45 minutes. They come back with some food. Yeah, yeah. So then we talk or eat. I don't want to eat their stuff because I know that then I have zero bladder control. And I mean, in a worse place. So you can't put your eyes closed. You can't close your eyes. You're just there looking for enemy. At the same time, Apaches are coming, there is some action going on. So those kind of operations started to happen. And eventually as our, like, the buildup for that was like, I think three months, we were not able to be at home. So. And we didn't have a next team to be prepared to, like, switch us out. So initially we had to be like eight months. And I think on like, fifth month, like, we was, okay, you can come home because we have nobody to send you. So we started pulling out from there because pretty much our overall intent was to showcase and get the qualification that, hey, we have worked together with Americans. We have to like, guys going there. We are now good in terms of books. We have done something now it's good. Nobody got killed, nobody got injured. Let's get the fuck out of there and let's concentrate on the stuff, what we have to do at home now, because now we have kind of done our job in terms of that. Now the next dudes who came out are like, in the. In the. In the very last moment when we. There was like, this one awesome operation that was planned for you guys while.

[Jocko Willink]

You were still there. Yes.

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah. So. But it did. It didn't get the green light because it was too crazy. Like, there was like a Taliban, like, training center.

[Jocko Willink]

Oh, nice.

[Remo Oyaste]

Obviously, like, numbers are always wild, but like 100 Taliban or whatever, and we will go over there in the middle of night and let's start doing things right. But that never got green light from the higher. So we got. We. The other unit came in from Slovakia, I think. And then I met like 10 years later, the partners in Estonia in Random bar. Just walking in the bar and saying, hey, I know you. We were in Afghanistan together. Like, they were deployed in Estonia. And then like, okay, how did your deployment go after that? And the. There was like two Slovakians got killed. So most likely they went and did that kind of stuff. So there were like, low operations, but a lot of, as you know, like, unlucky and crazy and wild ideas. Because if you don't get the momentum in, like, if you're doing one operation in a month, if you're doing one operation in two weeks, you don't get this muscle memory.

[Jocko Willink]

Yeah, you get the muscle memory, you get the repetition, you get the reps in. Basically, it's. It's nice to be able to do those just like, yep, we're Going, I remember when I was on my first deployment to Iraq, and I was in Baghdad, and my. My boss, my commanding officer, was like, hey, how much time do you need to be able to launch on a mission? And I was like, 15 minutes. And he was kind of like, no, seriously, like. And I go, no, seriously, if you give me a target location and you give me the frequency of the conventional forces that own that battle space and location of where they're camped at, I said, 15 minutes, we can be wheels up. And we actually launched a couple times on very short notice. Like, 15, 20 minutes. A couple times. One time we did it, and the guys were, like, in. Not in uniforms, and that was kind of jacked up. I was like, hey, bro, you couldn't put on a uniform in one minute? Like, he had 15 minutes to go. But I look up, like, we're rolling out, and I look at the turret gunner ahead of me, and he's wearing, like, just random American clothing.

[Echo Charles]

Jeans.

[Jocko Willink]

Yeah, like, literally jeans. Because, you know, he was just sitting around watching a movie in his tent or something. So he was wearing, like, board shirts, board shorts, and a T shirt or something. And just, you know. And it's my fault, obviously, because I didn't say, hey, here's the standard you. When you. We. When we roll, get your freaking uniform on. So I was, you know, had to. Had to tighten that up. But, yeah, we would. We could roll out pretty quick. And it. But the thing is, the reason we could roll out quick is we were doing reps. Like, we were doing so many. So many hits that it was just like, everyone knew their job. Everyone knew what to do, and we could do it. We could do a whole operation only with standard operating procedures, with no brief whatsoever. Like, breach team one. You got it. They'll figure that out. Assault team, you know what to do. External security, you're good. And vehicles, you'll get squared away when you check out the terrain. The vehicle commander put you guys in place. Boom.

[Remo Oyaste]

So, yeah, if you kind of wanted to get that part, then you should have gone to infantry in Estonia. Like. Like, if you go into Scouts battalion, they were, like, 10 years in, pretty much in Helmont. Oh, man, they, like, they had constant firefights every day, all the day. Like. Like, in six months, I don't know, 300, 400, like, contacts. There was one, like, Estonian company number eight, which was the bloodiest one. Like, they. They got a really. There was a one squad, like, I don't know, 12 people, and there was only one person who hasn't got injured, they lost few people, and they got like, hit really hard there. But for us, our one was lost. Nothing. Like the operational tempo was there was like, perfect first mission. That's what it was. Perfect first deployment.

[Jocko Willink]

Yeah. I actually feel that way about my first deployment too, because it was like the enemy wasn't that settled in yet. IEDs were kind of just starting. The ambushes were honestly not that Good. This is 2003, 2004, and we kind of had the upper hand when we'd roll out. And then by the time 2006 rolled around, it was like, okay, you know, had more awareness of what was going on.

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah, absolutely.

[Jocko Willink]

And we, like, you know, it's funny, I talked about Hilos, like doing Hilo ops. I never did a Hilo op. Never. I never did a Hilo up in combat because we just took vehicles everywhere. And, and even like in Ramadi, hilos wouldn't even. They wouldn't. You couldn't do missions. You couldn't do a mission in Ramadi with a Hilo. If you had a wounded guy, you couldn't get him out on a Hilo. You had to get him back to baseball, onto a secure part of the base, and then a Hilo could come. But there was no, like, going out on an operation in a Hilo for us. And we did it zero times. So the. Which is, you know, kind of. Kind of interesting because what's, what's interesting about it is when I was a kid in the teams, we would do training missions and they would call, we would use vehicles, we would use like big six by trucks, you know, like big five ton trucks. And they would call them, in the brief, they would call them a Hilo truck, as if to say, hey, if this was real, this would be a helicopter. And so my whole career, I was like, yeah, of course, you know, if war happens, we'll have all these helicopters. And then as it turns out, the way the war went in Iraq anyways, I know it was different in Afghanistan, but in Iraq. And look, there was definitely people that used helicopters in Iraq. I wasn't one of them. Like, we, we just. We had our own vehicles. We were gonna get to the target. We'll do it fast. In Baghdad, it was just, we all. We used hilos one time in Baghdad, but it was. We had captured a high value target and they. They took him. So they, like, met us and took him, which was kind of cool, but other than that, didn't do it. And then in Ramadi, couldn't, like, there was no Hilos in the city. Even the, even the Apaches, which are like flying tanks, they would barely roll into Ramadi because it was like just massive. When they did roll and it was scary. You just hear freaking the whole city lighting up like trying to shoot them down. So the Hilo truck thing, we actually did a bunch of. I mean we did so many operations in five ton trucks, you know, it's kind of crazy.

[Remo Oyaste]

We had a Gatling gun on one of the trucks.

[Jocko Willink]

Oh, nice.

[Remo Oyaste]

It was like usually the same thing. What happened with the dudes who later went to Africa, they got British trucks which looked like that. You don't want to mess with it. And all the people who got ambushed was in front of the French because they had weak looking vehicles. So. And they're like, they don't want the Vikings to come. Yeah, because if Vikings come then it sucks.

[Jocko Willink]

Yeah, so yeah, we had that too like on that first deployment to Iraq. So we didn't have armored vehicles. Our Humvees were just Humvees like with cloth doors. So we took the cloth doors completely off. We turned the seats so that the seats were facing out. And then the guys sitting in the Humvee, obviously the driver was driving but everyone else was facing out with their weapon out. And then in the back we had heavy weapons, including these articulating arms. And so this thing looked like. We called them porcupines because it was. And obviously we had the turret gun. And so it just looked like if you mess with this and there'd be whatever four, five, six Humvees that were all just look like porcupines. And it was a very good deterrent. We got ambushed a few times, but it was. We drove a lot. And to have had that little amount of. To only get ambushed a few times and have been on the road for countless hours, you know, hundreds of missions. Like that's pretty good. That kind of told me like the enemy is looking at us going, let's wait for the next convoy to roll by. Well, that seems like a good idea. They don't like same thing. They don't want the Vikings.

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah, they don't want it. They don't want the Gatling gun starting to shoot them. That will be bad one. And there was like those random times like where we're just driving back from somewhere. And once of the. Once was like like the over the checkpoints but that was established. They also did their test fires towards our vehicles. Once there was like American dude was on the behind the 50 cal and there was like this one like the hinge was up and obviously the bullets were in there. So they're like the random places where people could get get killed. But nothing really like happened. So we were lucky in that sense. But the next team, they were not so lucky.

[Jocko Willink]

Yeah. Estonians, I mean, they deployed to Iraq since 2003 and Afghanistan, I think also in 2003. Like constant.

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah.

[Jocko Willink]

On the ground presence from our allies in Estonia.

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah.

[Jocko Willink]

And suffered some pretty significant casualties. Like in Afghanistan, I think it's nine killed and 90 wounded. And then in Iraq, 18 wounded and two killed. So for considering how small your population is, that's.

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah, we were second, sadly.

[Jocko Willink]

Oh, you mean in comparison to population. Wow.

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah. In terms of lost, I think the first one was Danes. They were also wild people. So. Yeah, but that, that was the price so that we had to pay to get advancement in our army because that changed everything. Equipment got better, the knowledge got better. We now know what to teach to our conscripts. Otherwise before that, I mean, we were breaking, I don't know, bricks with your. Bricks with your hands. So that kind of changed.

[Jocko Willink]

How was it when you got home from this deployment?

[Remo Oyaste]

So first thing, what we did, we went to drink, obviously. So there were some like the first things, like it was hard to kind of get back to the normal life. I mean there was like a lot of stress. Like we had more problems when we didn't go out. Because if you stayed in our team, sergeant, he liked to find us jobs to do. So we had a lot of meetings, we had a lot of stuff. So we had internal, I would say stress rather than outside stress. When we got back, like the brain was a little bit stressed out and you couldn't like you read the newspaper. The biggest news is someone got a huge ass. And that's the biggest problem. So you couldn't kind of comprehend what, what this world is here. But that went on pretty fast because we didn't get much time to rest. We just went to start doing chase sets, going, doing some training with SEALs, going to Georgia, going to States. So we went on the road and. Yeah.

[Jocko Willink]

And are you thinking that this is going to be your career? Are you thinking you're going to do. How many years do you have to do to retire there?

[Remo Oyaste]

So in reality, like I had like 5 year contract, but you can get out from the contract whenever you want. Yeah. So there is no rules. There were like some, some, some people like saying that we have to change the rules because people can get out pretty much whenever they want. So. But yeah, pretty much it's not a system like in over here. So you have to like, you have to do the conscript service, which one year. And then first I got like this trial time for one year. And then you get, you get the security, like top security clearance for three years. And pretty much it will be three years, then five years. So.

[Jocko Willink]

But once you get like. I'm talking about you personally, what were you thinking? Were you like, look, I just, I done all this training, I went to Afghanistan, I had an awesome deployment, we're doing J sets. What's next? Like, so were you thinking you're gonna be a career soldier at this point?

[Remo Oyaste]

So I never kind of wanted to have a career. Like, I wanted to get the experience. Like, but that time I kind of like was there. I did really good in terms of like, I liked it. I. That was the first time I started learning with intention of wanting to learn. So it was fun for me because the development also was uphill all the time. And then when we came back, like, then there was a problem of not having enough work because there is like not many terrorists born in Estonia.

[Jocko Willink]

So being a warrior without a war has its problems.

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah, pretty much like that. And then we were like, well, also we were building our unit, so there was like a lot of things that we had to do internally to spread the knowledge and stuff like that. And then eventually we. There was opportunities to go to Syria. There was a lot of like other places, but none of. None of the politicians just kind of wanted to send us anywhere. And until until then, I think it took like six years when or seven years to get again to the area where there could be some combat. So there was a pretty long period. But that time I kind of like we went to now in a training mode. So Ukrainian war started in 2014, right? And then we figured out that there is a ways how to support them. So we started doing some stuff over there, helping the Ukrainian forces together with Americans, Lithuanians, Polish, Latvians. And during that time I kind of have a daughter born and she was one week old. I had to go away for a half a year again. And then was the time I was like, okay, I don't see any action coming. And I made a checklist, pros and cons. And it was like 140 to go out. So there was not much of decision. And yeah, so then I just pretty much said to my team that, hey, I'm thinking about other stuff. And I was like 27. I think that I will try something else because now it's the moment or otherwise I will kind of stay here. So. And yet it was time to let the other team know. And then pretty much I started looking outwards.

[Jocko Willink]

What insight can you give us on the Ukrainian military?

[Remo Oyaste]

So they were really bad at that time. So when we went there, yeah, they like civilians sent to the front line. Not with my training at that time. So when we actually like we have like this huge exercise, a spring storm when our like the whole country, NATO like sometimes it's like 10000 soldiers come together and we have an exercise which all is played out during one month. So we one month there is like maneuvers and all that kind of stuff. Everyone gets to train and it's like live like there's like a huge ftx and then we ask like Ukrainians like do you have also similar exercises to say yes, we have it. So. But they work differently. It works like this. Like for one month you train and it's like theater like because you know that in one month generals are coming to look how we are doing. And. But by that time there's like trails and then you go there and you fall at some place the tanks are coming. So it's all charade. There's nothing really there. And that was kind of the training that what they adopted from the, from the Russian army, that was the style of training. So their basic skills were pretty bad. And we were able to kind of help them to share the understanding of what we knew. What I would say that what they are on a really good level is like all like explosives, building puppy traps, building IDs. That's where they are on really, really high level. And they started to incrementally like war will teach them. Yeah, like eventually and I would say that at the moment they are pretty good on a pretty good level.

[Jocko Willink]

And they obviously have the will because it's their, it's their home.

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah, they have no, no, like. Yeah. I mean from 2014 until now when the war started, then I think that if I'm not messing up numbers they had sent through the front line like 300,000 men. And I think that they had like 14,000 or 11,000 casualties during the 10, 10 years. So they were in war all of that time. So they, they learned some hard lessons. And from our point of view we were able to learn in terms of our intelligence, we're able to start gathering information. And I think Estonia was at one point like one of the centers in terms of the accurate information that is coming from eastern side. So we are human and some of our services Started to get really, really good information and they got really good, like training from all of that.

[Jocko Willink]

Meanwhile, after that, you decide you're going to get out, and then what's your plan when you get out? So now you got to earn a living. What do you decide you're going to go do?

[Remo Oyaste]

So, yeah, I had a. I had a. I had an apartment, so I thought I would sell that. And then I got like, I don't know, €40,000 on a bank account, which I figured that, okay, for half of that I can pay a year's rent or something and then other I will invest in poker.

[Jocko Willink]

Okay.

[Remo Oyaste]

So I figured I left off with poker. I was pretty good at that, so I figured I would start that again. And then I started playing poker. And actually the problem was that I was doing too good. And now as you're doing good, you think that that's something which will last. And in reality what lasted was that I was winning money. I never like, lost in terms of I always made money, but my expenses were, for whatever reason, just going higher and higher and higher. And I didn't check the balance, I guess, or I don't know what the fuck I was doing. So eventually I ended up in a situation where I was minus 30,000 in like one and a half years later.

[Jocko Willink]

You needed to win more, bro.

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah, absolutely. Because if you want to like earn like, I don't know, three, four thousand in a month, you have to have about the bankroll of, I don't know, 100,000, because the highs and lows are so crazy. So there's so much variance.

[Jocko Willink]

So you got to be able to dig yourself out of a hole.

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah. So you have to have a bankroll.

[Jocko Willink]

And if you don't have a bankroll, you're just stuck.

[Remo Oyaste]

That's it. There's no stability. Like you can't get stable because you can't get the money out because you need it to work. So eventually there's no stability there. And I was like putting in hours. So for me now all the time. So I got together with the mother of the child just before deployed and then we were together like six years. Somewhere in the middle. My brother was like, born. And then I kind of like tried to figure out things. And then when we moved to Tartu and where I was from, then the rent went even higher because I started renting a house now, so.

[Jocko Willink]

And you're literally the only income you have is poker?

[Remo Oyaste]

Absolutely.

[Jocko Willink]

Okay.

[Remo Oyaste]

And then like, things start to like, don't work. But I'm never Like, looking at the red flags, I'm thinking, okay, if I do that. I was kind of like contingency planning all the time. So I was kind of like prepared. I knew that I can, whatever happens, I can dig myself out from it. So I always took like leap of faith, okay, maybe this works, maybe nothing worked. And then eventually, like, I put in hours. So when I came back, I was like, okay, how do I schedule my day? Because I had no idea how to like operate outside from someone telling me what to do. And the only thing what I knew is that, okay, in the military we had schedules like, this is how your day starts, this is how it ends. And then I just made a schedule. I planned every hour and then I had the schedule, like Saturday was a rest day. And every day I played poker. So now for me, I was always home, but for my family, I was working.

[Jocko Willink]

Was it online poker?

[Remo Oyaste]

Mostly online. Mostly online. So I eventually played like 6,000 hours in total. So I was sitting there like I think 2,500 hours a year or maybe more. So 10, 15, 16 hour days sitting behind the computer, just grinding, grinding and grinding and grinding.

[Jocko Willink]

Is it fun for you or are you just working?

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah, it is fun. It's fun and it's working. Like eventually it becomes work. It's a beatable game. It's just a skill game, I would say it requires the same thing with every other thing you have to learn. You have to be disciplined, you have to manage your bankroll in right level. You can't go and play if you have €1,000. You can't play a tournament within €1,000 buy in. You have to play €1 buy in because then you can play thousand tournaments. So. But yeah, eventually you're able to make some money. But it just, I don't know, I was somewhere in a tunnel because of my ego. And everyone outside was thinking, oh, Remo is doing so good. He's living in the right apartments, he's living large. But in reality, everything turned into shit. So obviously, as I put so many hours, I was not able to build a relationship with the mother of my child. And then eventually, like she came in at some point where everything was already shit anyways. And then she said that he found a more awesome dude than I, which I kind of agreed because to me that was like a way out. I actually pushed forward a hard conversation. I already saw a long time ago that this is not working, but I just postpone it and postpone it and postpone it. And that gave me a way out. And then when I got the way out, then that was the moment when I kind of stumbled upon on your book. And then on the first page, like, first I thought, obviously, where did my all of my troubles start? It was my mentor who led me into this hole. It was my like mother of my child who sucked things. It was nothing to do with me. And then I pretty much took that book and read the first chapter. It didn't take much more to figure out that I had to look into the mirror. And then I just started grinding. For the first two weeks, pretty much I was. I had €500, I had a rent to pay, which was like 1500. So I knew that we were going to split. I have no place to live. They don't have any place to live. So I called few of my buddies, I said, okay, I need €4,000, another loan. And then I figured out the place where they could live. And then there was my friend who was the same dude who talked with my uncle and cried that, hey, need something to do. He was like going to his friend's farm. And then I just went there for two months in the summer. And what I did, I just destroyed buildings.

[Jocko Willink]

Like, yeah, there was some demolition.

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah, yeah, something like that with whatever and just thinking about life. And now I was like, huh. I'm like, I don't know, 30 or 29. I'm like in the biggest hole of my life. I'm a retired. I have. I'm a soft guy. And I'm actually like, nothing. I have nothing. So I was in that spot and then I started asking, okay, what should I do? And then someone recommended me that, hey, maybe as you have a military background. We have, we starting to have a defense industry now, so maybe it would make sense that you start asking them because. And then I went to the defense industry page. There's like, I don't know, 100 companies in Estonia. And I just listed out seven of them because first one was like they were doing like empty shells that you can fill in with explosives or plastic explosives, so you can hit those under your bed. And they are not considered as weapons, but if you add C4 into it, it's a actual. It's an actual like M14. It's like Claymore. Yeah, it's Claymore, but also like this directional charge.

[Jocko Willink]

Efp.

[Remo Oyaste]

Efp, exactly. Yeah. So as we were testing those things when I was in the army, I thought, okay, maybe they would like to utilize my knowledge. They said, yeah, you can contact us in half year. Okay, cool. Then the Next. Next place was Milrom. And then I sent my CV over there. Just info mail. Hey, maybe you want me into your team? And then what company was that? Milroy Robotics. Okay, yeah, Estonian company. And then there was one dude who replied to me and he was a. He was a. One of the commanders in my previous unit. And he said, of course, come in on Monday. And I went in on Monday and then there was a work interview.

[Jocko Willink]

Oh, nice.

[Remo Oyaste]

I was sitting there and I saw that, oh, there's two other dudes from the sof and there's other dude. So there was only four military guys in front of me. And they just told me what I will start doing. I had no option.

[Jocko Willink]

Awesome.

[Remo Oyaste]

And then they asked me, so, how much do you want to get paid? I said, I need €1,000. I don't care about anything else. I need that. Then they all started laughing like, that's how low balling you are. Like, that's such a small number. So you will get like 2,000 straight away. I was like, okay, so you want to tell me that I have no skills and you are going to pay me, like, for learning? 2,000amonth. That's good for me. I only wanted 1,000 to get by. And then I pretty much figured. I just read a book outlier before that. And then there was a section like, there is. Sometimes things happen which shouldn't happen with you. And now most of the people miss them, miss those opportunities. And I figured out, okay, that's the opportunity that I shouldn't have. And then what I started doing, I just started.

[Jocko Willink]

What do you mean that's the opportunity that you shouldn't have?

[Remo Oyaste]

Like, it shouldn't. Like, if I just. If my friends were not there, I wouldn't get in.

[Jocko Willink]

Got it.

[Echo Charles]

So you don't deserve it.

[Jocko Willink]

So, like, you don't deserve it, so you should really get after it.

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah. So I mean, or is it like.

[Jocko Willink]

You shouldn't do it because you don't.

[Remo Oyaste]

Really deserve it in terms of, like, if you look at my cv, like, I would never get that position.

[Jocko Willink]

Yep.

[Remo Oyaste]

So.

[Jocko Willink]

So you were lucky to get that job.

[Remo Oyaste]

Absolutely.

[Jocko Willink]

And you felt that.

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah.

[Jocko Willink]

And you're like, all right, I'm going to work hard.

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah, I'm going to. I'm just going to do everything I can to make this happen. And I look at all the other people and said, okay, I will outwork all of you. And I was first person in the office, last person out from the office, and I just pretty much got after it. And when you have that Attitude and you have back against the wall. I mean, nothing is stopping you.

[Jocko Willink]

And then how long were you doing that for?

[Remo Oyaste]

So I was doing that for three years. So I started from being a project manager or program manager, which was like, I don't know, you get one army and you pretty much start building relationships. In reality, it was more of a business development sales job.

[Jocko Willink]

And this is when you say one army, you get an army from some other country.

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah, absolutely.

[Jocko Willink]

And you're like, you're going to work with this army from this country and you're going to sell them weapons, work with them.

[Remo Oyaste]

And first customer was like, I got designated Italy as a first customer on the first month they came into Estonia that they were interested in our robots. And what we did, we. There was four military dudes sitting on one side of the table. On our side of table, there's other four military guys. And what we did, we just talked, then we went drinking and we had good time. And that's how we started to build relationships. And it took me then like one and a half year of building a relationship. And eventually, yes, we got deals. Like, I was like, okay, so what are you doing this week? We had this amazing update. Would you like to know more about it? So that was kind of the stuff, what we started doing. And eventually, like, it was like a total startup world where we didn't have the product ready. And we were like, yeah, our machines are capable of doing Terminator stuff. But in reality, now and then I remember I had to go to give a presentation in Italy. And the way how it worked was that there was a huge tender. We were competing against all the huge companies, Rheinmetall, Leonardo and all the European big ones. And then I had to go there and provide a presentation. So the product that was presenting was invented day before in a slideshow. And the name of that was ISIA 2 or some, something like that. A really complicated name. And then I got the brief and then I had to go and present that to 50 kernels. And I was like. And then I went there just spoke something in 20 minutes. I have no idea what I said. And then the head of the overall thing that I like what you said. You know why? Because you're the only military guy here. You had the structure. You were like simple, clear and concise, like, all right, Roger that. I have no idea what I just said. But if you say so, then I'm good. And I was able to like build good relationship with them. And eventually we got to understanding of what are the tender Terms as I had a good relationship with them. Then we were able to get our team together. We wrote a lot of poetry into the tender documents, and eventually we won. I was like genuinely believing that we are the best partners for them. And then eventually we won the deal against all the big ones. Nobody believed in it. And that was one of the biggest deal at that time in the company. I was head of that. And then eventually we started delivering that. So. And I remember that was one of the best lessons I learned that when we went there and I. We already kind of knew that there was a lot of poetry. And when you go there and you are sit down and then they start asking questions about things that you know that you don't have. Right in the right order. And then we called it that. I was like. Like. I don't know how to say it, but, like, we went there to get on the knees.

[Jocko Willink]

Okay, yeah, that's.

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah. And that's what we did. Like, it was a really awesome experience of understanding how that works. But eventually we were able to start delivering them. We were able to cooperate with them, and we were able to eventually help them. So. But that. That was the world and that was like in Europe. And eventually, as I was successful in all of those things, eventually I got designated to the Middle east. And then I started going to the Middle East. Now what I did, the only thing what I did was building relationships, making connections to everyone. And then obviously, who do you like how that world worked for me? Same time when I went to Italy, there was one guy from flir, like, and Black Hornet driver. He was from Norwegian, sof. And you just. If you speak with them, you know that, hey, you. You have this language that you can start speaking of. And then I asked, okay, actually I'm like my main area of responsibilities in Middle east now. He said, yeah, I'm there as well. So, okay, next time when you come there, let me know. So next time I go there, I let him know. He. He tells me that, hey, we are drinking. Come and join. I go there, he puts me and he puts me on behind the table. Next to me is like a president of a company. In front of me, there is another owner of the company. They just won like a 70 million deal of drones or something. They're just celebrating. And now I'm there. What we do, we talk military stuff. We talk nothing about our products. We just drink, have a good time. Next day, they remember that, hey, we had a good time. So what are you selling? Oh, yeah, we have these robots. I Don't know, come and check it out. They come. Oh, this is really high tech stuff. Yeah, of course. Yes it is. And then you take like three months from there and they pretty much bought one without ever seeing a demonstration or nothing. So it's all relationships and then you start working on. So what I always did is that I built network which started. So I always gave, I utilized pretty much decentralized commands. So I'm cover moving, building relationships. We understand our intents and then eventually I let them do the job because I have no idea how to do anything anyways. Like I really don't know. So the only way I have is to let them do it what they know. And as they have a good track record, they start connecting people and eventually you're running in all the countries and you have agents on people's there. So only thing what you have to do is just manage them, provide them information and that how that world works pretty much.

[Jocko Willink]

So then at what point did you recognize that there was another opportunity in the world in terms of teaching what you had learned in the military to other people?

[Remo Oyaste]

So I kind of like recognized it in the very beginning when I joined the company because obviously at that point I thought that the only thing what I know is to how to shoot and blow things up because that was my profession. But then I started realizing that, hey, that experience, what we had because we were growing as a soft unit right then Milam was exactly like that. There was people especially there was military people and they actually had the same attitude as they were like as there. So it just started pretty much understanding that first of all the book that was really easy guide for me what to do. And eventually like I started understanding the Tate exactly the same. You just have to have the right attitude. So I understood that I have to have the same mentality how I got through selection. So one step at a time, not giving up being a team player, building relationships, trying to support all the kind of stuff. And then eventually I started understanding, hey, there is something there. I started listening more of your podcast and stuff like that. And that point I started putting together some PowerPoints randomly. Like you put it, you put together a PowerPoint, you think that it could be a course. Then I think I went to whatever page. I really didn't get far further than making an account on some page. I never uploaded anything, I did nothing. It was just I had a lot of PowerPoints in my PC. Then I contacted two other dudes, Martin and one other dude and pitched them, hey, let's do Something our own. But they were already like going to university, doing some other stuff, so nobody wanted to do anything. So I postponed it until one day. I don't know, maybe it was two years in. Martin called me and he said that, hey, I went to speak with in one company about military decision making, so mdmp, and they really seem to like it. I helped them solve a problem or something and it's okay. And there was like one person who had transitioned to another company and she wanted him to come and speak about that again. And then the problem statement, what was in the email was like, my people are not taking ownership. Like, this is not a military decision making problem. This is like ownership problem. They need something else. And so what I would do is that because I had already observed all of your stuff so much that I said, okay, we should like just talk about what's written in the book or give them a book or, I don't know, do something about it, because they don't definitely need that. So he kind of like, but I don't know, let's try and put it together then. Together. I said, okay. And then next day, we founded Combat Ready. I went to the, I don't know, I looked. Okay, what is, what is their name? Echelon Front. All right, so what could be our company's name? So he took some military vocabulary, just started scanning. So what could be our name? So randomly, Combat and Ready. So everyone is facing some battles or combats in their life, so they have to be ready for that. So I don't know, it makes sense. Whatever, I like it. And then we established that because in Estonia, it's all digital. Like you can do like 99 of stuff. You can do digitally. Everything in government. Like, we are like Estonia. It's like one of our, like, I.

[Jocko Willink]

Don'T know, it's like the pride of your country.

[Remo Oyaste]

Exactly.

[Jocko Willink]

Well, that's actually something to be proud of because here in America, these fools, dude, you want to get something done in America, you got to fill that out. I can't. And then you're going to get some other form you got to fill out. And then you got to fill out the same form. Like you're filling out the same information over and over and over again. It's ridiculous. So good job. E. Estonia.

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah. So yeah, everything, banking, everything is online. Like signing things online. Everything is online. And then what? So in estonia, it takes 15 minutes to establish your company.

[Jocko Willink]

Damn. Nice.

[Remo Oyaste]

You go there, you fill out some forms. I don't know you. Oh, that's what we do whatever. And as he was an officer, he knew things, what to write.

[Jocko Willink]

He's filling out the forms.

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah, he's filling out the forms. I have no idea what to do with those forms. So that's what we made clear in the very beginning. You're a form guy. You do our finances, you do our housekeeping on that side. I want to do nothing with that. And I don't know how to do it either.

[Jocko Willink]

Check. So then, how was the first gig? What was it? What kind of company was it?

[Remo Oyaste]

So it was a, like an insurance company startup as well. We went there again, seven women looking at us, and we are talking something about extreme ownership. We also put in the military decision making. We also talked about things that we knew. And then the first reaction from them is at home. Makes sense. Like, all right, we got something. I know. I remember when we were walking away from that place to. We were high fiving like, huh, that felt good.

[Jocko Willink]

Yeah.

[Remo Oyaste]

So we actually did something.

[Jocko Willink]

When I. When I talked to a fir, my first civilian company, I walked out of there going. And there's actually. When the person asked, like, I went through the brief, the combat leadership brief. It's the same thing that we give Echelon front. And I got done it. Then I started answering questions. The first question when I answered it, I was like, oh, this, this applies to everything. And I, I knew, like, we got something here. So that's how you felt.

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah, I already knew it while I was implementing those because it was so obvious that this works. I even bought everyone, I even bought everyone this book in my team because I saw that they, like, they had, they complained about, we don't have a time. We don't have enough time. Yeah, I know. You come in nine, you leave at four. So I'm coming in at five and leaving at seven. And I have plenty of things to do and everything gets done. So you like. I understood that they were in comfort zone already. They have egos, like military guys still, so they were not paying attention. Now I gave them the book. And then eventually one guy reads it and he calls me like one month in, like, hey, awesome book. I really liked it. Now I understand whose fault it is that everything is shit. The CEO. I was like, of course, now you understand it really well. So, yeah, so I kind of gave up on that. But yeah, I really understood because things started to go in the right direction. Like, everything started to turn around in my life.

[Jocko Willink]

And then. So you started turning around your own life. Now you get an opportunity to go talk to These seven women, they're kind of high fiving. What year was that? Do you remember?

[Remo Oyaste]

It was 2022.

[Jocko Willink]

Okay, so that's relatively recently.

[Remo Oyaste]

So 2022, 21.

[Jocko Willink]

Okay.

[Remo Oyaste]

Because commentary is already three years old. So. Okay, yeah, 21.

[Jocko Willink]

So 2021, you do this first event. Now what's interesting to me is a lot of people would have said, okay, extreme ownership, cover and move. Simple. Prioritize and execute decentralized command. I get it. How about we go total responsibility. How about we go fire and maneuver? Keep it simple, stupid. Analyze and prioritize and then empower your people. You see what I'm saying? Like you could have easily just said, I see what they did. I get it. I'm from a different country. You could translate the exact same words and just be like, in Estonian. I would never know it. You're a stand up human. That was like. Actually, no, we got them from this book. Let's, let's, let's give credit where credit is due. But you know, for me, like from a humility perspective, like, that's pretty awesome, you know, for, I mean, everyone's competitive and. Oh, those, you know, we're, we're the SEALs. You know, they're just doing the basic military stuff or we know stuff too. So where'd that come from?

[Remo Oyaste]

I think, I think it, it came from one just because we did one like one month long training in Norway with seals SEAL Team three.

[Jocko Willink]

Are you sure it was SEAL Team three? Yeah, that's really weird. Most of the time they don't go to Europe at all.

[Remo Oyaste]

They were like responsible for Europe.

[Jocko Willink]

So it was either team two or there has been some funky deployments.

[Remo Oyaste]

Maybe P2 then.

[Jocko Willink]

I don't know, it might have been two. Yeah.

[Remo Oyaste]

So you, you were seal team three or what?

[Jocko Willink]

I was seal team two, seal team three, seal team seven and seal team one.

[Remo Oyaste]

Okay, so but task unit was, what cruiser was SEAL Team three? Okay, so then it was SEAL Team two. Okay, yeah, so. Because it wasn't the same number. Okay, so yeah, it was SEAL Team 2. And we were doing things over there together with them. We, we, we formed the one task force. And I really just liked what they were doing. I mean, there were junior guys who were totally junior and they were designated initially drivers to us, and then we were driving them to their operations and stuff like that. And then I know they were the first unit who kind of didn't throw other branches of army under the bus. So they have a different attitude. They were training all the time. They were boxing in this we were living in same anger. So, I mean, they were kind of legit. And there was like really huge winds at that one day when they had to go out there.

[Jocko Willink]

Wind?

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah, wind, yeah. Like really strong winds between the fjords. And then they have to go in operation. And in the middle of the night, we. I take them to the port. There are local people tying down boats because they have a storm which even had a name. I can't remember what the name was. So I already see that the name was Satan's Breath. Something like that. And then they went out.

[Jocko Willink]

Yeah.

[Remo Oyaste]

Even though they knew that there will be no reach or they will never reach to the place where they had to go, but they had to go out because it's a good training. Right.

[Jocko Willink]

That's what we do.

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah. And then take them back. They were so fucked up. Totally wet, totally, like, done. And then I kind of gained respect on that. And also, like, at the same time they. They got a call in. There was one, I don't know, oil tanker taken over by someone somewhere. And they started switching their locks out. The FTX locks, or is it epic? I don't know. Whatever it is, like blue ones, which you can insert in your own weapon. So they took those things out and we're like, okay, what are these guys doing? They are actually putting actual stuff together, so. And then. Oh, we can't tell you. Okay, fine. And the next day we read from the newspaper that SEALS went and, I don't know, rescued the ship or onboarded it and took it down. Then there was a lot of celebration. The HQ stayed there, we continued our operations. But that kind of experience eventually, like, we had respect because they were kind of legit, obviously. Right.

[Jocko Willink]

That's awesome.

[Remo Oyaste]

And it's good that they don't have to, like, think it. It was really the first unit that kind of impressed in that sense that they didn't throw anyone under the bus. And sadly, I can tell that the green brace, they threw SEALS and everyone else under the bus constantly.

[Jocko Willink]

So anyways, it's a strange thing because it doesn't seem like it, but when you talk smack about other people, it. It doesn't really. It doesn't really sound that good. You know, if. If when Ekko walks out, you know, to go grab a drink, and I'm like, you know, Ekko's not really that great at Jiu Jitsu. Like, what. Who does that? You know what I mean? Like, that's just such a.

[Remo Oyaste]

And I would say also, like, I don't know, I worked with probably like 10 ODAs or something like that in total. And they're like, they were like Odas which were like totally legit.

[Jocko Willink]

Oh yeah.

[Remo Oyaste]

They said nothing. And then there were like, some of them were like one dude or two dudes were like, had huge egos and they kind of on all of their.

[Jocko Willink]

Yeah. And don't get me wrong, I mean every unit has some dudes in it.

[Remo Oyaste]

With that are, I know we had.

[Jocko Willink]

Them losers and they're the biggest egos ever. And broadly speaking, most dudes like are good mugs. Like you go to absolutely ODA team, you go to a raider platoon or troop. This is the SEAL platoon. Like the dudes are good dudes and there's of course there's some loudmouth in there and there's someone that's disgruntled and there's someone that has, you know, insecure and so they're going to talk smack. But most dudes, and of course, you know, it's like when you're in the dudes that you meet you're like, oh, these guys are good to go most of the time. So yeah.

[Remo Oyaste]

And I think that that experience kind of gave me that I wanted to share the respect and continue it. And then when we saw those principles and actually like, hey, let's build a relationship with those dudes because we have no idea how to do any of this and they have been doing it for 10 years. So why not let's, let's, I don't know, let's partner up because we would have to invent a bicycle like and there's no point of doing that. Yes, we can write our own book like Extreme Responsibility or we could maybe be smarter and say responsibility extreme or I don't know. Yeah, but that's not worth it. So yeah, we started, wanted to start from the right foot and after that training we decided after high fiving that let's write to you guys. We figured out, I don't know, I think we were not able to find your emails.

[Jocko Willink]

We have like a contact page@I sawfront.com.

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah, exactly, something like that. But then we did our osint. So we had a pretty good training in terms of intelligence, how that word works. So we went back, I don't know, five years to do your first page and then we got all of your emails and then we just added you guys there in the CC line or whatever and then started sending the first email. Leaf was the one responded back, thank you for your service. Two guys from Eastern Europe and go to the Academy and see what's up. And then we went to the Academy.

[Jocko Willink]

So the Academy is our online training program. So Leif was like, hey, that's awesome. Thanks for your service. Go check out the Academy.

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah, exactly. But we, we want the partnership, which.

[Jocko Willink]

Which props to Leif.

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah.

[Jocko Willink]

You notice he responds.

[Remo Oyaste]

Absolutely.

[Jocko Willink]

Good for him.

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah, absolutely.

[Jocko Willink]

I always joke, life is way nicer than I am.

[Remo Oyaste]

Absolutely.

[Jocko Willink]

Like, he's like, when we go meet people, he's talking to someone for nine minutes. You know, I was done in 30 seconds. And I'm not a bad person, but like, hey, how you doing? It's good to meet you too. And Leif's like, so where are you from? And it's just like, he's just nicer than me. And, you know, he gets an email, he's like, hey, thanks for your service. Check out the Academy. You know, Right on.

[Remo Oyaste]

And then, like, God bless him. Then we got that move and he's doing that great. I mean, we. We were so happy that we got an email back.

[Jocko Willink]

Yeah.

[Remo Oyaste]

Like, okay, we have something. And then what we decided to do is that, okay, let's start then providing value. Because, like, what can we do? There's nothing what we can do out here. Let's start grinding through the Academy. We saw that. Okay, it seems not to be digitally perfect because there was some. It was like very first time when you went online with that. So we started seeing things and then we started writing feedbacks. That's a really great way how to build a relationship. You start telling what they're doing wrong. Especially from the point where we were. We knew nothing in reality. So that was the form of value. What we thought that, hey, like, let's do that. They should, like, they are talking in all of their posts that they appreciate feedback and stuff like that. So we can't go much wrong. So I started doing that. That really didn't work out. We were really sending a lot of emails. I think eventually we didn't get much replies anymore because I don't know, because.

[Jocko Willink]

I never saw them.

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah, absolutely. And then eventually, like, we thought that, hey, so this is not working.

[Jocko Willink]

And were you still. Did you still. Were you still bringing on clients at this time and you were working?

[Remo Oyaste]

No, no, no, no.

[Jocko Willink]

You're still trying to figure out how to get this thing launched for real.

[Remo Oyaste]

Because we both had the, the real jobs. I was still like flying to Saudi and stuff like that, doing the other stuff. So that was kind of like a hobby. Let's see what we can make out from that. And then we thought that, hey, so what options do we have? So they have an FTX somewhere. Most likely we should be able to showcase that we know what we can do because it seems to be a military training type of stuff. And then we said, okay, 4000, whatever it was. All right, so Martin told me that, hey, let's go there. Yeah, so where do we get the money? Like, huh? I had like a credit line, like, I don't know, with 15 or 20% interest. I took a loan, like, oh, now we have tickets. I already bought them. Oh, so now we're going. Yeah, we're going. So now we kind of had it in April. So we. I prepared a homepage, a really good one. Of course, we had zero pictures of us in civilian clothing, I would say, because the first time I even bought adult clothing was when I joined milrom. Until then I just had T shirts and then I had to wear a button up shirt and stuff like that. So that was the first time I had adult clothing. And then first of all, we didn't have any pictures. We only had pictures from military clothing. And then everywhere. What we decided that, hey, we don't want to do anything behind your backs. We want to do it the right way. So I created the homepage with Chaco here, Chaco there, Leaf there, extreme ownership here. So that's what we do. And then eventually we had a vacation for two weeks and then we flew to States and our plan was that, hey, let's go there. We have already provided so much value to them by providing them a lot of feedback. So let's go there and let's see what happens. And then we eventually arrived, then we had the first meetup or whatever. And then I had an app, I don't know, wix or whatever it was. And then I started getting like hits. Like someone is watching our Homepage from Dallas. 10 hits. Which means that, okay, now I knew that they know who we are, what we do, what we kind of want to achieve. At least they have a ballpark understanding. And then we said, okay, now we will never initiate any conversations with them ourselves because then we will look needy. So we will not be needy. So now the only thing, what we have to do is just go there and perform.

[Jocko Willink]

Mm.

[Remo Oyaste]

And then the next came in, next day came in, and then first exercises started.

[Jocko Willink]

Yeah, it was. Honestly, it was so legit to watch. I wish, I wish I had film of it because it was like, I would say, like, it was like jiu jitsu, black belt against white belts. And how Much. But it's different because jiu jitsu in its. In its nature looks sloppy. You understand what I'm saying? Like, jitsu in its nature. There's movies.

[Echo Charles]

Yeah. If you didn't see it before or.

[Jocko Willink]

Whatever, this was like a different thing. It's like watching someone do a different. Like a. Like a sport. Like the hurdles or something. Like, do each. Like a decathlon.

[Echo Charles]

Yeah.

[Jocko Willink]

And everything. They're just, like, smooth and just. And. And yet. And you're literally watching people that have never done a pole vault before. Imagine a dude that's never done the pole vault before, and he's running down the track carrying a pole for the pole vault. Like, this is a disaster.

[Echo Charles]

Yes, sir.

[Jocko Willink]

And in the midst of a guy doing that. A guy throwing a javelin backwards. You know, like a guy, like, dropping a discus three feet from the circle. A guy jumping on the. On the long jump, like, three feet and then falling on his face. That's what we're watching. And then there's two guys that are just like, mechanically. Just slaying. And I immediately walked up to jp. It was probably JP that checked your website. I walk up, I'm jp, Like, who are these two dudes right here? And he's like, dude, they're Afghan soft. Like, I go, oh, sorry, They're. They're Estonian soft. They deployed to Afghanistan. I was like, check. I go, this is going to be awesome. And, yeah, so it was. That. That was a freaking great move. That was a great move that you guys executed. And you. I would say you had me at hold what you got. Move forward. Like, one of those things where I was watching, I was like, okay, well, these guys are in the game, you know?

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah, that was the thing. Like, then I think we did, like, two runs, and then it's like, okay, sitting down. Hey, we would like to do the same thing in Estonia. And you said, okay, now you got my attention. And he's, okay, now, Martin, we, like, mentally high fived each other already. Let's not fuck it up anymore. Let's just keep cool and let's continue. We continued that, and then we got the green light from you, and we brought the flag with the message that. Hey, we gave you Estonian flag with the message. I remember that. This will. When you have a hq, this will be first flag that you pull there in front of your hq.

[Jocko Willink]

There you go.

[Remo Oyaste]

And, yeah, I mean, that was the planted seed. Then we got back, we saw that this FTX thing works because we had no idea how to conduct it initially. And then we Went back, we gathered up a group of friends, like I don't know, 15. And then we run our first trial. So we rehearsed and obviously we got a really good feedback. Then we next, Martin was working in, I don't know, governmental company and said, okay, we have this new training idea, maybe let's run all the departments through that. And obviously we did it for whatever, nothing. And then that started to build like, yeah, like we, we had content. Then I made another amazing video which sucked of course. And then basically, okay, we have no idea how to market anything. So the first person we came in like was one lady, okay, we need marketing. And she initially thought that who are these military guys? You're selling some military stuff. She didn't understand anything. But eventually we got her on board and she started, made us a new homepage and then we started doing Facebook content and with that was awesome, awesome thing because so far the eight years while I was in the military, we didn't have any Facebook, nothing. 0,0 social media. And now you guys tell me that I have to start making videos and speak things like to other people about how to, I don't know, live their life. Like that's stupid. Who does those things? And then I had like, I made like videos. I need a 30 second clip. I like did maybe 40 takes. And then I said like okay, I can't do it anymore. And look at this. Oh yeah, it's perfect. No, it sucks. But okay, give it a headshot. So in the beginning, Martin did all the videos because I just didn't want to do it because it felt so fucking weird to speak some things to other people and teach them whatever. I mean, it doesn't make any sense. And then eventually like we had I think 4 or 5 FTXs. I did like 2 hour keynote of introduction in my company and we had the same idea. Like, okay, we have to kind of like in the defense industry, it's like if you go to the customer and they first ask, does your own army use your equipment? And if you have no, then you're pretty much nobody wants it. Why? So you want to sell it to us, but your own government doesn't want it. So we figured that okay, if we are able to kind of help our own companies to improve, then we have like, yeah, we did it over there already, it works. So we started with our own companies and then word started going around, we got our first customers or something like that. And by the end of that year we had, there was I think like a conference, whatever the Conference was we kind of got a classroom and obviously when we went to see where the classroom was, it was on the third floor in the furthest corner. And we thought, okay, nobody will, first of all, nobody will find it. And then when we started talking about it then for whatever reason, there was 100 people and nobody. Like there was not enough room for people to get into the room. And that I think that day I was like, had been drinking until 4 because that was the way how you build relationship in defense industry. So that was my gig. Like I went there on a conference and every day until whatever and then I had two hours of sleep and we. And I gave first English keynote, which went perfect. That's perfect, right? I couldn't have done it most likely in any other condition. So it went really well. And now we said, okay, now we have again new information out there. And then I saw, started thinking, okay, how do we make it every time when we go there? We have to do something bigger and something more bigger. And by that day, by that year, end of that year, I think we maybe had run, I don't know, five trainings or something like that. So nothing much. And then as we didn't have any understanding of how to do the classroom trainings, we just figured out some things. It was like we talked about so many stuff that you can't imagine. We talk about everything, indirect method, ego, like all the things what you could possibly talk about. But still the feedback was really good because nobody has previously ever talked about it. So it doesn't matter if the content is so good. Like they say good. And then eventually, like Martin had to go away, so now the company was pretty much on me because he left to Europe to run some huge projects, which meant that he now was our source of finances because he got a good salary and we were just doing, I don't know, zero money, zero nothing. So we're not making much money. But at least we had our jobs, so we were able to live on that. But we were making no money. And then we had to start bringing in new instructors. Sorry, I'm actually speeding up. So the first year after we did those first gigs, for whatever reason, me and one other dude were like talking. Hey, so like in Estonia, like you can get a, like a, a, a, a mark if you are best leadership or training company, like instructor or whatever. Like, how do you get that? Like, and I was talking with one dude and like, we were like, okay, this is most likely a corruption anyways. Like, it's just a pointless piece of Thing. And then in one week, someone called me, hey, you have won an award. We went there. All of that news went to hr. So everyone started to understand that there is a company who's doing things differently. They are from ex military guys. So it was like a new thing. So. And especially like the war was just started. So we were in right timing. So everybody, we got everyone's attention and from there on we just continued on growing and growing and growing, started to implement the same stuff.

[Jocko Willink]

So had you already left your day job at this point?

[Remo Oyaste]

So I ended up my. I left my day job by the end of 2022.

[Jocko Willink]

Got it.

[Remo Oyaste]

So one year in, I think that 2022, we ended up with like 70,000 as our overall revenue. So because we were able to end like half of like 50,000 of that was the after September or something because it's like continuously started going really, really high. And then he had to go away. And now I needed few guys because I were not able to do it alone anymore. Then there were some dudes coming to me, hey, hey, I want to do the same stuff. So what do you want to do? I want to be an instructor. Okay, so these are the terms. These are the. We. We can't pay you any money, but you can do a lot of work if you want. There is a lot of opportunity here. We have seen chuckle in real life. So we were like awesome dudes. Like, we were already like interesting to other people in the military. So. And then we started doing that and eventually what happened is that second year we had already like, we had like 450,000 as a revenue. So. And we never focused on any numbers. We're just doing the right things for the right reason. And the second time I went to the same conference where we had a classroom. So how I kind of got us to the main stage because we didn't know anyone. And I went to the. I gave an interview because there was like a interview of some of the speakers from the last year. They asked me to come to the office and I said, okay, so now actually what we would like to do is that we would like to get on the main stage. Like, okay, so who is your. Like, who is the decision maker here? And she led me down the stairs and showed the dude sitting in a corner who was doing something with an axle. So I thought, okay, so I will go there. And they jump in, take just one step in and said, hey, we need to get on the main stage. Can I sit next to you for a minute? Okay. So I kind of like, went there and nuked it. Like, just everything went out straight away. Then I sat down there and he started saying, like, hey, actually, I don't know what you guys are doing. Military stuff. We actually have here, like, we want to talk about peace and stuff like that. We don't want to really bring any military stuff in there. And they were like, looking for prime minister to come and speak on the main stage. And like, what does a prime minister know about leadership? So but I can see that. Is this the schedule? Yes. So I can see that here is an open space. So could you just lead your mouse there and just write combat ready there and that you just lead his mouse to that place and wrote combat ready. And that's how we got to the main stage. Just default aggressive going there, saying what we need, and we got it. So. And that's how we kind of ended up doing everything. Just going there and asking or telling. I don't know. I don't know how we did it, but we just pretty much default aggressive has been always the thing.

[Jocko Willink]

Yeah. That is obviously default aggressive going there and make things happen. And look, can you be too default aggressive? Yes, you can. It's called getting kicked out of buildings. It's called, you know, hey, security.

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah.

[Jocko Willink]

But if you have a good attitude and you're like being professional with people, the guy probably saw something.

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah.

[Jocko Willink]

When you were talking to him. And there you go making it happen.

[Remo Oyaste]

So next year in business, the new guys that we recruited, I started going there together with them half a year. I kind of showed them how I do it. So I gave them piece by piece, just talk two loss now talk free laws, now talk four laws. And that's how we get them going. And by the end of the year, one of the dudes, he got awarded as his next trainer of the year. So we have been able to do that two years in a row. And just everything started to go now. What was one of the things is that we still didn't have any contract with you guys. So we were just still. We had no PowerPoints, we know nothing, no actual information. So everything what we actually teach was like what we saw from Internet. And then so pretty much what we did is like, kind of like, like, we got your word, but it's kind of like illegal in a way. But yeah, we were saying that we got it from there, but I mean, we just invented things and then we just took a leap of faith and then I decided that, hey, okay, this doesn't seem to go anywhere. And I just Started treating you guys as a management board or board of the directors or whatever, and then say, okay, every quarter I will start sending you C trips, which you didn't ask, so just started sending those ones forwards. Sending, sending, sending. And at some point in the end of then 2023, I think Lindy or someone.

[Jocko Willink]

I think it was Lindy.

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah. In like, in October or something like that. Like, hey, now you have reached, like, you have. You have become into our product list over here. And we would like to now make it, like, official. And it's like, yes, eventually, like two years, we are there now. We had a really, really hard conversation in terms of contracts because everyone's saying, like, it's really difficult to have contracts with Americans. A lot of legal stuff, a lot of different terms. And our. Our agreement was very simple. Like, Lindy was saying what was expected from us. Like, these are the numbers. I said, no, we can't do it. We can do it with these numbers. She said, yes, okay. Then there was like some other similar stuff. I said, no, we can't do it. We can do this. Okay. And then in one week, sign. Where do we sign? Here. And it was done. And then next year again, we were in a classroom. We were on the main stage. And now in January, the same event happened. It was a startup day. It's like a huge conference. And then we got your video of explaining that, hey, combat ready is our new certified instructors or whatever. And that was on the main stage. Now, everyone knew it was like article in the newspaper and stuff like that.

[Jocko Willink]

Psychedelics.

[Echo Charles]

Big time.

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah. And that's where, like, everything, like, went there. Like, we just utilized, like, we were like, thinking, Martin, like, what do we have to do? We just have to do what's written in a book. And if you do things what's written in a book, you can't go go wrong. And eventually, if you do the right things for the right reason, things will start to happen. And that's how we got here.

[Jocko Willink]

Yeah. I liked when you were telling me yesterday, I think you were saying, like, listen, you and Martin were saying, listen, we need to do what it says in the book. And if they do what they say they do in the book, we're going to be good to go.

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah.

[Jocko Willink]

And sure enough, we're good to go. I learned something. Echo Charles in Hollywood.

[Echo Charles]

Sure. Hollywood, Hell, yeah.

[Jocko Willink]

What I learned in Hollywood deals is when the principals want a deal to happen, it's going to happen. And the rest is just like, people, you know, make it. They're gonna make it happen. But here. And so that's part one, part two. One of my favorite things to do in, as a combat leader is I would just say do it. So, like, on the radio, like, Leif would call up and be like, hey, jocko, we got another building. It's two blocks down. We saw some squirters coming out of that. We want to go. We want to go. Hit that thing. Do it. And it was just like, that's. That was like such. It's. It's even just like a little bit better than execute, Execute, execute, execute, execution. You say, like at the beginning of an operation. It's cool, look. Is it cool? It's cool. But to have like some other branch plan be coming in with some explanation behind it, and to have the decentralized command where it's like, hey, we need to bump across. You know, hey, this is a jocko. We got to move across this road. We got a. We got another vehicle we won't inspect down here. I might have to blow. Blow the trunk open. Do it. You know, it just like, oh, yeah. So good. And so, like, when these contracts is like, I get a long email like, hey, with the thing and the this and the that and the response. Do it.

[Echo Charles]

Oh, yeah, I've experienced that one many, many times. Oh, yeah, yeah, we'll do it. And I get. I gathered that same thing. Like, I see what you're doing. It's pretty freaking dope. So I. I get it and respect.

[Remo Oyaste]

It, and that's what we're doing. We're doing it.

[Jocko Willink]

Yeah. But really, honestly, the. The seeing you guys in the deck decathlon on the battlefield, the FTX battlefield, was like, I was so freaking pumped that you guys were so squared away, because part of it was like I said in the opening, sometimes I would watch and I'd be like, dude, is this too. Like, am I crazy? Am I. Is this too hard for people to actually be able to do? Like, these people are going insane. Like, have you been. You haven't been to ftx, have you? Oh, you have.

[Echo Charles]

Remember one of the OG Utah. In Utah.

[Jocko Willink]

Oh, okay. Oh, yeah. Okay. You see people going crazy. Like, I need four more guys over here now. And by the way, like, no one's gonna die or, like, you totally freaking out. And. And these two guys were just like, robots, just Terminator robots. And I was like, who the are these guys? And it's like, oh, their Estonian special operations forces. They. They deployed to Afghanistan. I was like, oh, roger that. And I think actually JP was like, they use Our principles. I he something like. I don't know if that was what he gathered from the web page or whatever, but, you know, JP's always, like, doing his research and stuff, so. But yeah, so you combine all those things together, which. Each one of those things was, like, doing the right things for the right reasons. And also, I. That's like, one of the conversations I had with my team. I was like, hey, they could be teaching, you know, total responsibility and that. And. And they're not. They're. They're like, cool. And let's, like, these are the kind of people we want to work with. There's no. Did you guys. Don't you guys want. Didn't you guys want me to go to Estonia?

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah, I think so.

[Jocko Willink]

Yeah.

[Remo Oyaste]

I mean, we. We said, like, hey, can we, like, we have those kind of ambitions? Of course. But we realized on the very first. In the beginning that that's not going to happen.

[Jocko Willink]

Yeah. I mean, at some point, it will make it happen. I'll probably do, like, a full European tour. Echo, Charles. We got to go start and end in Estonia. What up now? Yeah, the. Back in the day, you know, the. When I was at SEAL Team 2, get some deploying to Europe, and guys would deploy to Estonia, and, like, everyone loved Estonia. They thought it was like they were in heaven.

[Remo Oyaste]

Yep.

[Jocko Willink]

And so. But I never went there, unfortunately. So at some point, we go into Estonia, we're going to rock and roll. So how many instructors do you have now?

[Remo Oyaste]

So we have about seven instructors.

[Jocko Willink]

And then what's their qualification process look like? You. You. I guess you already went through it.

[Remo Oyaste]

So. So, yeah, I mean, we kind of change it. So we have now belt system.

[Jocko Willink]

Okay.

[Remo Oyaste]

White belt, blue belt, purple belt, brown belt, black belt. Now everyone. We.

[Jocko Willink]

By the way, we have. We have. That idea has been a thing at Echelon Front, bro. It. It's not a thing, but it has been. It's. It was on. It was. It was discussed.

[Echo Charles]

Yeah.

[Jocko Willink]

You know, I think I was probably the guy that was like, well, that's Jiu Jitsu. I don't know. But we didn't do it. But that's.

[Remo Oyaste]

And we. We defined all of the belts, what they mean. And at the moment, we changed it, like a month ago. That's what we did. Because we wanted to have a very specific way how we can actually, like, understand who is where, what is your way of moving forward. So at the moment, other than one person, everyone's white belt. And it's not. It's not easy to get the next Belt. So it takes years and it takes certain like modules that you can have. I mean most of them because we had our own stuff, right. We were not like doing specifically as you have been doing. And now as we have trained together we have now better understanding of how you actually teach those tools. So now we just reorganizing all of those things and now we are able to actually teach things to specifically the way you do it. And we are much more precise, it's more, much more useful. Because so far, I mean our average score, because after every training, how we got here is like we asked feedback from customers and like the average score like in terms of numbers is like 9 out of 10. So it's a good stuff. But it wasn't as practical as we wanted or it wasn't. It doesn't, didn't have the fine tuning. Now we are fine tuned in and now we have kind of like a blueprint and it takes only like minor month or two for them to get to the blue belt. It takes another month to get to the brown belt. I don't know will anyone ever get to the black belt? But definitely somewhere in the middle. So because we are able to affect, because we have like a lot of people who have previous coaching experience and working with companies and we have run like long term programs already but we just didn't have a system. So now we just established a standard, we established a system which we can just internally understand. So most of them are still able to go and execute with every customer. But it's just internally something to measure.

[Jocko Willink]

And you just came out and went through our first at echelonfront, our first train, the trainer program where it was a nine month program that you went through. Most of the nine months was virtual. So you guys were doing calls and zoom calls and giving briefs, learning briefs and then had. Then I think there was a total of 10 people showed up here in San Diego to get certified. And yeah, it was pretty awesome because it was like give your brief and get really good feedback. And everyone had already kind of built the brief where everyone gave a great brief. Like I told, like I told everyone today, it's like giving a brief is not an easy thing and giving a brief with specific content is, is challenging. And then to give a brief with a lot of pressure where you know you're going to get picked apart, that breaks people.

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah.

[Jocko Willink]

And, and everyone, everyone from a bunch of different industries came in, stepped up and, and delivered an awesome job. And then we do like a hardcore Q and A murder board do you, do you guys say the term murder board?

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah, we had it in the. Already in the NCO school. We had that for two weeks.

[Jocko Willink]

Oh, two weeks of.

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah. If you want to be an Instructor like every NCO, every senior NCOs, everyone who wants to be a senior NCO during that school, which is half year, you will have two weeks where you have to instruct. I know. Here is Carl Gustav teach it. And then you get a specific template which is like timed. You can spend five minutes on this. You, you have to say these three words. You have to provide an intent. You have to have an instruction in the end of the course. You have to have a practical session. Like it's very much laid out. And now you have like, you get like free topics which you have no idea about. And then you have to precisely give it based on that template and it has to be timed. And now the difference is that if I like the murder board is full of the same dudes. So you get one squad, each one gets three lessons. And now for two weeks you're just grinding and you, if you're murdering that guy, they will murder you. And most of the time like the people who are the weakest, they get murdered the most. Of course, because people start asking so stupid questions and then like that guy freezes and then. No, that's not a pass anymore.

[Jocko Willink]

Oh.

[Remo Oyaste]

So that's how we like roll. But that gives you like a really good like baseline and I think that's where kind of the instructor skills came from. And as I was also explosives, I had to conduct and that I trained other like people to be able to blow things up. So I had that experience from there. So dealing with safety and being. I had all the papers in terms of being. I learned how to do, I learned how to demi like. What's the word?

[Jocko Willink]

Explode.

[Remo Oyaste]

Yes, Diffuse them.

[Jocko Willink]

Diffuse. Yeah, yeah.

[Remo Oyaste]

All that kind of stuff. So. And now if you start teaching those things, you. I mean it's very basic in terms of. But we had so much like repetition.

[Jocko Willink]

Yeah. And that's the thing is it makes you competent as an instructor. And that was the goal of the, of this training program, this train the trainer program at Ashland Front. Now most of the people are people that are coming from their company and the purpose of this is to be able to be an internal trainer in your company. The only people that we took from that's going to go and do this training outside is just you and Louis.

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah.

[Jocko Willink]

And Lewis is a character.

[Remo Oyaste]

Absolutely.

[Jocko Willink]

Because here you are Estonian Sof and Louis is. Well, first of all, he lives in Estonia, but he's not Estonian. He's from Australia.

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah.

[Jocko Willink]

So he's from Australia. And he, his background, his. He was a comedian.

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah.

[Jocko Willink]

And he was a comedian. And then he ran like, he brought. I guess there was no such thing as stand up comedy in Estonia.

[Remo Oyaste]

Yep.

[Jocko Willink]

And so he started stand up comedy in Estonia. And then you talk to him and it's like, oh, the way that he got that going and made it work was extreme ownership and the principles of combat leadership that you teach, which is such a great. Like, you know, normally I'm like, oh, we, we work with all these different companies. You know, this oil company, construction company, finance company, insurance company. Now I'm gonna be like, stand up comedy company. You know, like, let's go full range of motion on this gig.

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah. And yeah, he, he, like, as, as he's putting it, like, yes. This principle. Peoples also work on crazy people. So they work on everywhere. It doesn't matter where you are. So that's why we're able to actually, we have been able to influence so many companies already. Our government, we're able to. We're working with ministries, we are working with kindergartens, we are working with schools, we are working with the Defense League, we are working with military. Again, like, I mean, startups, hundreds of companies have gone through the training. I mean, this. Principles just work.

[Jocko Willink]

Yeah, it's pretty awesome. Speaking of kids, you guys just. Well, now you guys have your own publishing company.

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah.

[Jocko Willink]

Right. And you bought the rights for a kid's book called Way the Warrior Kid. That one Echo Charles. And you guys just released the Way the Warrior Kid book one.

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah, it's. It's going to be released on November. In the end of November.

[Jocko Willink]

Okay.

[Remo Oyaste]

Before Christmas.

[Jocko Willink]

Okay. Actually, speaking of which, I think this might have happened. I think you just emailed me a little while ago and said, hey, we're.

[Remo Oyaste]

We'Re modifying or whatever we want.

[Jocko Willink]

Can we modify the Way of the Warrior Kid so that Estonian kids aren't trying to memorize American presidents and the Gettysburg Address? Because that doesn't really make sense in Estonia. And I believe I'll have to check. I believe that I replied, do it. I'm pretty sure I'm gonna check.

[Remo Oyaste]

It was like two words or something, but it was along those lines. Yes.

[Jocko Willink]

Yeah. If it's do it, I'm gonna be pretty pumped.

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah. And that's how we made that happen. Like when we saw that we have a blueprint. You have created a blueprint that's how it is. That's how simple it is. Just do those things, what you have been doing here, do that in your country, do that in Europe, wherever. And then I love the story of how Choco Publishing got published. Like, how that company came to life. That's a good story.

[Jocko Willink]

And then watch this.

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah. And then we, like, initially we wanted to start giving out that book. Like, I don't know, we actually asked another publishing company in Estonia who has came out with these books. And hey, there is also a kids book that maybe we would like to like, that would be useful for kids. And then they were kind of looking into it, but then, I mean, like, 2500 was, I think, the fee. And then there was like 8%, but they wanted to have it like, it was 10% fee, but they wanted 8%. So they were not. We are not able to make money. So, okay, fuck it then.

[Jocko Willink]

Watch this.

[Remo Oyaste]

And then we. It took like another half year. And then I heard that you're making a movie.

[Jocko Willink]

Yeah. And I was like, better get in on this now.

[Remo Oyaste]

Strategically, we have to do it now. And that's what we did.

[Jocko Willink]

Yeah, that was a good move. The movie is going to be, you know, we. The movie is wrapped. Echo Charles. You heard of that before?

[Echo Charles]

Yeah.

[Jocko Willink]

That's a Hollywood thing.

[Echo Charles]

Yes, sir, it is.

[Jocko Willink]

See, I got to say Hollywood words for Echo Charles to make sure that he knows that I'm aware that I said a Hollywood thing. Because if I ever. If I was just now just be like, yeah, well, you know, we wrap filming on that project.

[Echo Charles]

Poser. Poser.

[Jocko Willink]

We. But it is kind of a big deal to rap. And I'll tell you why. Because until you have it filmed, anything can go wrong. Like, there can be a strike, someone can get hurt. There can be like some crazy lawsuit. Like, you just don't know what could happen. And. And. And it's like the difference between having it wrapped and not having it wrapped is like the difference between graduating from SEAL training and being somewhere in the pipeline in which there's no freaking guarantee that that's happening. So that's pretty good to be wrapped. And it's a smart move that you formed your own publishing company, bought the rights, and now when that movie comes out, you're gonna sell a bunch of books.

[Remo Oyaste]

Absolutely. That's the point. And the most importantly, we're able to impact some. Some of the youth 100%. And actually, like, we have, like, this youth organizations under Defense League, like, I know Scouts, Boy Scouts and girls and stuff like that. They were one of the first customers in terms of who we went and practiced because, like, okay, like, we get like €100 and we have a whole weekend to test out these principles, how we should teach it. And that's what we did constantly. We spread the information to the youth. So we got our repetition in and then, okay, this works. This doesn't work at all. So we tested it on kids and kids loved it. So definitely we have been able to impact a ton. And we have also been able to go to Balkans. Initially, we thought that, okay, because there was a company in Estonia who had subsidiary companies outside from Estonia. And we did one gig with them and they said, okay, we have four subsidy companies in the Balkans. We want them to do it again, to do the same thing. So we went to the first company, we thought, okay, now it's Estonians coming to Balkans. Like, there's a cultural difference, most likely, or stuff like that. So we did one first training. It was much better than Estonia because Estonians are like, like stone people. They have zero emotions. They don't ask any questions. They're like, yeah, like, not very social people. I'm like, not. I'm not the normal Estonian anymore. So we went there and now the first month was their best revenue ever. Like, after the first month, now the hq, everyone. Yep, let's go.

[Jocko Willink]

That's. That's the story that's been repeated over and over again. Echelon Front, like, some random person in one of the departments of the company scrounges together some money that he. That he saved from some other project that they were doing, brings in Echelon Front. And, like, the growth is there, and the next thing you know, we're working with the whole company. And that's. That's just happened over and over and over again. So the fact that you're out there in Europe being able to make this happen and, and again, you know, it's like we say in the book, Extreme Ownership. These are not new, random. Like, these are not principles that we created from dust. These are things that we learned that were passed down to us. And they've been. So. They've been tested over and over and over and over again. So it really isn't that big of a surprise when a company hears the principles, takes the principles, implements the principles, and they have their best, Their best profit, their best engagement with their teams, like, the whole thing. So it's pretty awesome to see.

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah, and that's that. That's the thing. What, what we say that if, like, we try to be an example because in. In our opinion, like, the best way how to, like, change our culture in Estonia is to be a good citizen and do a great job and being a demonstrator of those principles. Now, I've always said, like, if we will fail, all of what we have teached you doesn't work. And that's why we initially, with Martin, like, okay, every business book says that it should be like, 51 49. It shouldn't be 50, 50, because there will be dispute and there will be a problem. And we were like, if we are not able to figure out the problem, then we are not supposed to do it anyways. So let's put it in a situation where we have to do it in the right way. If not, then doesn't matter what we speak. It doesn't work anyway. So don't listen to us. Just look what we're doing, and we are moving in the right direction. We are doing the right things, and things happen.

[Jocko Willink]

And what's the ultimate goal?

[Remo Oyaste]

Well, the ultimate goal is, first of all, to change Estonian culture, help people, help the youth. Because, I mean, we are dealing with symptoms, which is the adults. We have to help the root cause. I mean, there's so much. If I would have, while I was in the school, if there was someone who actually would have given me and teach me some of those principles, I would be. Would. Would have been way better off prepared for life. So what do you want to do? We want to strengthen our own culture. We want to have a nice place where we can live. And also we have to help our neighbors. So we want to just. We want to make Europe great.

[Jocko Willink]

I like it, man.

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah. So that's what we do. And. Yeah.

[Jocko Willink]

Does that. Does that get us up to speed?

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah, I think so.

[Jocko Willink]

So for people to find you, you guys are at www.combatready, you're on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, all those at Combat Ready, you've got your personal Instagram, which you are very apparently proud of. Ramo. So it's Ramo Oyesta.

[Remo Oyaste]

Yes. I'm gonna. I'm gonna just say yes.

[Jocko Willink]

Yeah, and that's. So that's spelled R E M O O J A S T E. That's where people can find you.

[Remo Oyaste]

I think Louis wanted me to say that the web page should be Europe Combat Ready. Ee because we are, I don't know, upgrading it.

[Jocko Willink]

Oh, okay.

[Remo Oyaste]

But you can find it from both places.

[Jocko Willink]

So what's Lewis's Instagram? People want to check out his.

[Remo Oyaste]

It's Louis Z.

[Jocko Willink]

At Louis.

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah.

[Jocko Willink]

And does he do funny stuff on there? Does he do leadership stuff on there?

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah, he's always funny.

[Jocko Willink]

I. You always learn stuff, right? Yeah, like when we teach these classes, you know, you're always learning stuff. You and I had. I learned from you about, you know, decentralized command and the expansion of simplicity and the expansion of relationships and what. Which is. Which is something that I've talked about before. But you were like, hey, you know, what decentralized gives you is a culmination of. With all these things, time. Very good. Excellent. So I learned that from you. It was excellent to learn. And then from Lewis, what I learned is echo Charles Lewis is a comedian sitting over in the corner right now, and he was given his brief and he said, hey, when there's a. There's a technique called the read back. If I want to make sure that Echo Charles, hey, we need to show up tomorrow at 7 o'clock in the morning. We need to be prepped to record a podcast with four people. Can you. Hey, just to make sure you. I made that clear, can you give me a read back? And you say, yep, we're showing up at 7:00 tomorrow recording a podcast. Gotta be ready for four people. Okay, cool. Boom. That's called the read back. So what Lewis pointed out was that you can use the read like comedians use read backs because it gives you a second to think. So if a heckler calls out, you know, and this is what I did. So I was like, hey, guys, this is a technique that he used. And Dave Burke was sitting there, good deal, Dave. Yeah, you know it. And so I said like, Dave, like, you know, heckle me. And Dave's like, you know, he's a kind of like, what? And I said, heckle me. Like, say, you know, something negative or whatever. And he goes like, yeah, who cut your hair? And I go. And so I was like, oh, read back. Because I got to think of a comeback, right? Who cut your hair? And I said, who cut my hair? Your mother, when she left my apartment. Boy. But it's true. Like those little. That's a little technique and it's technique that you use as a comedian. It could be a technique that you use as a leader. Not just to make sure that you've confirmed someone's comprehension of your information, but if you do something I don't expect, I can actually give you a read back to give me some time to think and to clarify that I understand what you're talking about, by the way. And as actually, he gave a whole, like, note about it where you can, like, the read back itself can be funny. You know, I can miss read back your thing.

[Echo Charles]

I actually noticed that when comedians do what we call crowd work, right, they do the read back. And how they use that is they'll read it back, but the way they do it to make it sound funny, they'll just adjust their tone. And I'll be like. One time I'd be like, hey, wait, that sounded funny, but it wasn't funny. That's why I notice it. He was like, he'll be like, oh. He's like, what's your name? Oh, John. Right in the crowd. And be. He'll be like, what do you do? He's like, oh, I'm a, you know, a manager at a tech company. A manager. And he'd look around at a tech company, everyone would start laughing. I was like, wait, wait, that wasn't really. See what I'm saying? But I saw. Oh, I know what he's doing. He's buying time so he can think of his jokes. You see what I'm saying? But it's real subtle. But yeah, you're right. That's good. That's very smart.

[Remo Oyaste]

Interesting enough like we had discussion with Louis and read back is a form of detachment.

[Jocko Willink]

Yeah, that's true too.

[Remo Oyaste]

And also it's a form of prioritization because if you give me 100 words and I give you back 10 words, what is that? I'm giving you the priority words that you received. Yeah, exactly.

[Jocko Willink]

And are they correct? Yeah, yeah, those are all good points. Learning all the time.

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah.

[Jocko Willink]

So. Yeah, that. So what's the new website? Say it one more time.

[Remo Oyaste]

Europe Combat ready.

[Jocko Willink]

Okay, cool.

[Remo Oyaste]

You can find us from the Internet. Yeah, I'm sure.

[Jocko Willink]

True echo. Charles, do you have any questions?

[Echo Charles]

Yeah, one question. What's the most you ever won in a single poker game?

[Remo Oyaste]

I won like 15,000Euros.

[Echo Charles]

What's the Euros to dollars? That's what I figured. Okay.

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah, yeah, it was. It was like 200, 000 croons.

[Jocko Willink]

Did you walk away?

[Remo Oyaste]

So what I did, it was that. That was like in. I was, I don't know, 18.

[Echo Charles]

Oh, damn.

[Remo Oyaste]

And that's what I won. And what I did with that money, of course, nothing useful.

[Jocko Willink]

Yeah, yeah, I think, I think I was. I think I won like 2700 bucks in Tahoe and walked away like a boss and had like a kick ass weekend. I was 22 years old. Like, let's go. I made how much money? That was like a month's worth of pay. Bro, that's a lot back in the day. And I was like, I walked away like a boss. Yeah, you're like, you sure you don't want to play one more hand? Like, no, dude, I'm out.

[Remo Oyaste]

The funniest, funniest way how I won, it was like, like usually like, you should be like super concentrated, right? So what I was doing is that I had won a satellite ticket, I don't know, for 10 bucks. The buy in was hundred or something, so it was like thousand people tournament. So I had this set up on laptop. I had two and a half men running the T series on this screen. It was America's Army. I was playing that game. And then in this corner, I had the poker like table open. So I was actually like doing four things at the same time. And I drink Jim Beam at the same time. So in the end of like, I don't know, five hours, it's like, okay, now there's only 25 people left. I recognize that. So then I said, okay, now. Sorry, sorry. American army friends. I now have to go and concentrate on winning some money. And they're like, what? What do you mean? Like, yeah, I have been playing poker at the same time. So I'm here like I already have one 1,000. I have a possibility to win like 25. But I eventually got second place. And they were like, what? And they're like, yeah. So yeah, you can download that app into your computer and as we are already having communication, I can start commenting you what I'm doing on that poker table. And I think that was the only thing what saved me because I had drank a lot already. So now I had to pretty much go every move and teach them, which made me cautious, disciplined, and eventually I got second place, I got some money and I continued the poor lifestyle.

[Jocko Willink]

There you go. Anything else? Echo shows. Any other questions?

[Echo Charles]

That's it. Really good stuff.

[Jocko Willink]

All right, Remo, any final thoughts?

[Remo Oyaste]

Yeah, I mean, just. Yeah. Thank you for writing those things. Thank you for living those principles because if you didn't, like, none of this would have worked. So thank you for telling me what to do in your book. So, yeah, I mean, it's been awesome, right? And we gonna continue doing that. We will leave or we will. Yeah, I'm just 30ft 35. So for the next 30 years, we will conquer Europe.

[Jocko Willink]

That's what I like to hear, man. Freaking outstanding. Well, thanks for joining us. Thanks for sharing your lessons learned, obviously. Thanks for your service and thanks to your countrymen for their service supporting our allied troops. And fighting alongside us. And thanks for what you're doing today, you know, taking these principles. You know, you were in a Kush job and you took a risk and you are now making this happen. You're going to help kids, you're going to help parents, you're going to help adults, you're going to help Estonia, you're going to help Europe.

[Remo Oyaste]

Absolutely.

[Jocko Willink]

Outstanding. Keep getting after a man. And with that, Remo has left the building. Good to have some Estonian special operations forces in the building.

[Echo Charles]

Yep. Agree. There was. There was a quick segment where he was talking about. He gave a brief before. Before they started combat. Combat ready. He gave a brief and he was like. He was like, hey, that was the guy who. Maybe the client, the guy who was giving the brief.

[Jocko Willink]

4.

[Echo Charles]

He was like, hey, that was really good. And he was like, oh, I don't know what I said, but cool. You know? Remember that part?

[Jocko Willink]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I.

[Echo Charles]

Here's what I think. Here's what I suspect. I think he. He knew what he said. He was being funny and kind of humble. I think he knew what he said. I think he was just surprised that he was just like, hey, I just said what I thought I knew. You know, which is nothing. You know, when you compare it to, like, you know, when the real experts roll up and they're using jargon, they're doing the whole thing, theatrics and the big words and the cool stuff. Right?

[Jocko Willink]

Yeah.

[Echo Charles]

And it sounds good, but I think we all got. You get used to that after a while. Right. Where it sounds good, but it's like, man, I don't know, man, I should have took more notes maybe, I don't know, you know, kind of a thing. But cool. It sounded good. And then when you get someone who just delivers it super simple and subsequently easy to understand, you're like, bro, that was freaking great. Like, I remember everything you said, and it was so groundbreaking because it landed on my brain, you know, so now I know.

[Jocko Willink]

And another component there is. He's given. It was his first keynote in English. So what does that make you do? Simplify. Look at you.

[Echo Charles]

Yeah, man, I noticed.

[Jocko Willink]

Yeah, it's a short brief, but everything's really simple, clear and concise, landing not using any big words, but using the good words that actually work. And the thing that he mentioned quite a few times, which is awesome, is like, well, the content is. It. It's the truth. You know, as I said in that thing the other day, it's like, oh, why is the book Extreme Ownership popular? It's because it's the truth. People read it and they go, yeah. You know, they're like, it's kind of indisputable and it's written in a way that people understand and go, yeah, I can understand this, Brad.

[Echo Charles]

It's so true. Because let's face it, there are in, there's a lot of books and just speeches and keynotes and you know, experts with opinions who instead of just sheer like undisputable truth, they'll say like real inflammatory things that have some level of truth, but there's just a lot more to it. But they like to say real inflammatory for the attention, you know, that front end, the front end attention kind of a thing. But then, yeah, a lot of times it doesn't last. Or you build a reputation for just saying inflammatory things that have like many levels and areas or areas of dispute. We'll say. And then, yeah, it doesn't tend to last.

[Jocko Willink]

I think, oh, I like it. And you're speaking of inflammatory.

[Echo Charles]

Sure.

[Jocko Willink]

We want inflammation to go down.

[Echo Charles]

We don't like inflammation.

[Jocko Willink]

A lot of that is based on like what you're putting into your body.

[Echo Charles]

Sure.

[Jocko Willink]

Let's get the good stuff in our body. Jockofuel.com Go check it out. We got, look, we got everything that you need. We got molec protein, we got hydrate, we got greens, we got joint warfare, we got super krill, we got vitamin D3, we got cold, we got everything that you need. We got energy drinks even, we got hydration. And it's all clean and good for you. So go to jockofuel.com get some. Also we're at Wawa vitamin shop, GNC, military commissaries, Aphes, Hannaford-stores, Wake Fern, Shoprite, Heb Meijer, Wegmans, Harris Teeter, Lifetime Fitness Shields, small gyms everywhere, jiu Jitsu gyms, CrossFit and by the way, Walmart. Yeah, we got Walmart. I just was down at Walmart doing some burpees with the troops. Multiple San Diego so far we did Bentonville. So we're going to get around to some other Walmarts as well. We're working it. So that's what's happening. Jockofuel.com Check out the goods. You need the good stuff to fuel your life, your existence. Go get some also American made products. OriginUSA.com OriginUSA.com look, you heard what it was like. Even the remnants of communism is terrible. It's terrible. Just the remnants of it. Slave labor. You have to fight against that. Well, do you want to pick up A gun and go get on the line. Maybe you do. I kind of do. But let me tell you something else. If you don't want to get a gun and get on the line, go to OriginUSA.com. get some American made jeans. Get some American made hunt gear. Get some American made Jiu Jitsu GS, rash guards, boots. Everything that you need. Not made in a oppressive, tyrannical state where the people live as slaves, but made right here in America by Freedom. OriginUSA.com Go check it out.

[Echo Charles]

Shoot. Well, side note, Origin USA, newest product. One of the newest products, Jiu Jitsu belts. Yeah, you notice that one?

[Jocko Willink]

I didn't get one yet. I kind of need one, too.

[Echo Charles]

Yes, you do need one.

[Jocko Willink]

My belt's kind of old, and I've always felt like I'm just gonna have that belt forever. Yeah, but it's kind of getting ridiculous.

[Echo Charles]

Yeah. Plus the Origin has one, so it's kind of like. Yeah, look, you can hold on to your old one. I get it, bro. It has a place in your, you know, in your life or whatever. But let's face it.

[Jocko Willink]

What?

[Echo Charles]

You don't have an origin belt.

[Jocko Willink]

Suck. All right, maybe we have to get Hannah a purple Belchy. But she got Sass purple.

[Echo Charles]

Yeah, she got that special one, too. Yeah, yeah. But multiple belts, there's nothing wrong with that. Oh, you seem sane, though.

[Jocko Willink]

I. I've never really kind of walked down that road right before. You don't, like, collect, like, no belts. And I know that people do do that, but I've not done that. I have had one belt per rank.

[Echo Charles]

Yeah. Yeah, me too, now that I'm thinking of it. But not anymore.

[Jocko Willink]

And somehow I don't have them anymore. My blue belt was awesome because I had it for so long and I had done, like, old rigger type stuff for it with the sewing machine. I sewed the black stripe on there. And like, you know, I sewed it on myself and it was like, mega, durable, infantry quality. But if you need a belt, originusa.com go get some.

[Echo Charles]

How can you not? How can you not? It's true. Also, Jocko. The store called Jocko Store. It's where you can represent discipline equals freedom. Shirts, better shirts on their hats, hoodies, some shorts on there. Socks. I know I've been talking about socks for a long time, but this time I mean it. And. And you'll have them wait this time.

[Jocko Willink]

Because they haven't been there before. It was only word. It was only talk.

[Echo Charles]

Yeah. You know how you're setting things up for this.

[Jocko Willink]

What do they say on release?

[Echo Charles]

Discipline equals freedom.

[Jocko Willink]

Would it be weird to like a person like me to wear those socks?

[Echo Charles]

No. In fact, I think and I designed and created those socks with you in my mind because you have those lame brain freaking socks that you wear. So if I give you these. Actually, you can't wear them from working out for working out.

[Jocko Willink]

You could if you want, but it'd be a waste.

[Echo Charles]

But that's not what they're for.

[Jocko Willink]

What are they for?

[Echo Charles]

Looking good and freaking representing. You see what I'm saying? You know, sometimes they are looking good.

[Jocko Willink]

And representing on the, on the, in the, in the squat rack.

[Echo Charles]

No, we are there for sure, but head to toe. I'm talking about from head to toe. Look, you're doing great.

[Jocko Willink]

We're not doing that. We not got some origin RTX on what?

[Echo Charles]

Socks?

[Jocko Willink]

No.

[Echo Charles]

Okay.

[Jocko Willink]

Upper body.

[Echo Charles]

Okay. Okay.

[Jocko Willink]

You're lower body.

[Echo Charles]

Doing good from head down to the waist or shorts or whatever. But yeah, the toe part. You're not representing, bro. You're looking. You're looking like you're looking. Put it that way. Anyway, so. But we have some socks. They're coming. They'd be in time for Christmas. The holiday is the whole deal. The whole deal. It's gonna be ready. All right. Also, short locker subscription.

[Jocko Willink]

You making a one for Christmas? I got some ideas I need to talk to you about.

[Echo Charles]

Okay, good. Yeah. Chocolate nonetheless. New design every month. Boom. Sign up subscription scenario. It's called the Shirt locker. It is on jockostore.com check it out, check it out.

[Jocko Willink]

Also primalbeef.com and colorado craft beef.com we're making the best steak in the country. Delivered to your door. If you need steak. If you need ground beef, if you need meat sticks, go check it out. Primalbeef.com coloradocraftbeef.com freaking outstanding people. Outstanding companies. Outstanding steak. Let's go subscribe to the podcast. Also subscribe to Jocko Underground. Also subscribe to our YouTube channels. Check out flipside. Canvas.com Dakota Meyer baking. Cool stuff to hang on your wall. We got a bunch of books. I've written them. I've written a bunch of books for some reason. You heard about one today. Extreme Ownership. I wrote another one called Leadership Strategy and Tactics. I wrote another one called Final Spin. I wrote another one called Dichotomy of Leadership. I wrote a bunch of kids books, including one that is available in the Estonian language very soon. So check all those out. You know where to find them. Speaking of Echelon Front, you heard a lot about it today we solve problems through leadership. Go to echelonfront.com for details on that. Also, we have an online training academy, which we received amazing feedback from Ramo. Unsolicited feedback just to tighten things up, you know, just poured into us with value. He felt bad about that. He brought it up a few times. I honestly never saw him. And I'm sure it was good feedback and it probably got implemented. Yeah, like, probably someone on the front lines was like, oh, cool, we'll make that different font or whatever. Yeah, no, because I don't know what they were saying, but yeah, fully.

[Echo Charles]

But you're. And. But you're. The thing in which I think he was kind of alluding to kind of hardcore, that it's kind of what you say, where it's like, Brad, you can remember that one. I think it was episode. I'm pretty sure it's 184, maybe 164. Either way, we're talking about how, like it, information, feedback, a plan or whatever, when you try to convey a message, you can't just beam it. You can't shove it down their throat. You gotta be like a quarterback. Remember my friend Court, my quarterback friend, Tim Carey, where he was perfect. This other guy, he would just jam it to show everyone how freaking hard he fast he can throw. He's jamming us up, hurting our fingers and everything. Tim carried lob. He. He didn't love it. He lob it and he puts it perfectly. Wherever you are, that's where he is.

[Jocko Willink]

He getting picked off because he's throwing a little bit more gentle.

[Echo Charles]

No, no, no. See, that's all part of. That's all part of the delivery. He knows when he has to beam it 100% or gun it or whatever. See what I'm saying? But anyway, I think that's what beam. Funny word.

[Jocko Willink]

Is it like back in the day when you were a little kid, like, I got beamed.

[Echo Charles]

Beamed, yeah.

[Jocko Willink]

Dodgeball. It's true. It's what you caught yourself. You like beam or through, but you kind of like. We're trying to. It may have fallen out of parlance of our time. Right?

[Echo Charles]

Yeah.

[Jocko Willink]

Where now it's like people don't say beam anymore, but we're bringing it back.

[Echo Charles]

Oh, big time. Well, in football, you'd say be like if. Let's say it'd be more like. Like a funny clown scenario. Let's say the. The receiver ran the wrong route and.

[Jocko Willink]

You beam him right.

[Echo Charles]

And you throw it to him. Like you gun it to him and it just hits him in the back or the shoulder. He looks too late and it hits him in the head or whatever. It's like, yeah, it's like you got beamed.

[Jocko Willink]

So it's still a football thing?

[Echo Charles]

Oh, yeah, big time. But gunning it means, like, I freaking zipped it as hard as I can. Sometimes it's appropriate, but sometimes it's not. You can't just be gunning in freaking criticism for the academy. See what I'm saying? And I feel. I think that he felt like he might have been doing that, like after the fact, you know? That's what I think.

[Jocko Willink]

Yeah, he felt like he beamed it.

[Echo Charles]

Beamed like too much of it. Gunned it, gunned it, beamed it, the whole deal.

[Jocko Willink]

Hey, I'm real hard to offend. You take a lot more than that. But anyways, what they gave us critique for which we completely took on board and modified stuff. The Academy. Extreme ownership dot com. Go check it out. And that's all part of Echelon Front. You heard these principles that we talked about today. They help so many companies, so many people. Go to echelonfront.com check it out. Go to extremeownership.com check it out. We're here. We got these lessons. We learned them, we captured. We want to pass them on to you. We want your life and your team and your family to be in a better situation. So go check them out. And if you want to help service members, active and retired, you want to help their families, you want to help Gold star families, check out Mark Lee's mom, Mama Lee. She's got an amazing charity organization. If you want to donate or you want to get involved, go to Americas mighty warriors.org and also don't forget about heroes and horses.org. that's where Micah Fink is bringing our veterans up into the mountains to relocate their soul. And he's doing a great job. So check that one out. And also, Jimmy May has got an amazing organization beyond the brotherhood.org check that out. He's helping seals transition out of the military and into the civilian sector and doing a great job. If you want to connect with us on the interwebs, rewind and listen to whatever that website is that they said for Combat Ready. Also Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube. Combat Ready EE At Combat Ready EE.

[Echo Charles]

The website is Europe CombatReady.

[Jocko Willink]

Okay. There you go. Thank you. I didn't take that note. Thank you, bro.

[Remo Oyaste]

Look at you.

[Jocko Willink]

Covering. Move. Covered. Move. Reem and Remo is Ramo Oyaste. It's R E M O O J A S T E for us. I'm a Jocko dot com. All the stuff's there. Jocko dot com Also on social media, I'm at Jocko Willink. Echoes echo Charles, just be careful when you go on there. You don't want to have your entire life freaking disappear without even thinking about it while you scroll. While you doom scroll. Right on. And thanks once again to Remo Oyesta. Oyesta. For everything you did in the past, your past service and your continued service helping people become better leaders and better humans in business and life. And thanks to all the military around the world, especially our allies. And a solemn salute to our Estonian brothers. Thank you for the sacrifices you made to defend freedom around the globe. Also here at home, thanks to our police, law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, Border Patrol, Secret Service, all other first responders. Thank you for keeping us safe. And to everyone else out there, like Ramo Oyosta says, like combat ready teaches, use the principles. Use the principles. They're free. This is no big secret. They're free. You have to pay anything for them. You just listen to them right now. Cover move simple. Prioritize next to decentralized command. Use them. Be default, aggressive. Take extreme ownership. There you go. They work. Use them. That's all I've got for tonight. Until next time, the Zeko Ninja out.