David i dont consider myself a journalist. Nobody else would consider myself a journalist. I began to take on the life of being an interviewer even though i have a day job of running a private equity firm. How do you define leadership . What is it that makes somebody tick . Mad dog plays no games right . David most people i have interviewed are people i have known for quite some time. In the case of jim mattis, i have never met the man before. I thought i better be careful when i shook his hand, but it was the opposite. I recognized quickly he has a certain reserve, a certain manner that would take someone want to follow him as a leader. I suspect had he never gone into the military would have been successful in business, politics as well. I think he has Great Potential to be a leader in our country. David you are minding your own business after having spent 40 plus years in the marines. You are in your native state of washington and you get a call from Vice President elect pence to come and meet donald trump. You had never met him before. What did you think that meeting was about and do you have any regrets about going to the meeting . [laughter] david or your decision to become secretary of defense . Gen. Mattis i do not live a life of regrets. If you are enjoying life shortly after an election and the phone rings, do not answer the phone. [laughter] gen. Mattis i was brought up i the greatest generation. I was brought up to believe that Government Service is an honor, privilege, but it is a duty. Whether it is the president of the United States that asks you, whether he is a democrat or a republican, if you know you can do it, the response is affirmative. David any regrets about having resigned . Gen. Mattis you will all understand these are the finest young patriots in our country signing that blank check payable to all of us with their lives, the men and women of our military and i love being back. It is the best job i could have imagined. I miss being around those people. I do not live a life of regrets. There comes a time when you know what you have got to do. David you never look back . Gen. Mattis i look forward like dallas. [applause] david i wish i could do that. I always look back on the deals i should have done. I wish i had that same ability but ok. [laughter] you disagreed with President Trump on syria by you have been careful not to criticize President Trump in a public forum since you resigned. I probably will not persuade you to do that here about the reason you dont want to comment on your service as secretary of defense is what . Is it because you are a former cabinet officer . Gen. Mattis i resigned over a policy disagreement, you are right. I put that disagreement in a page and a half letter. The letter has been released. The french call it a duty of reserve, a duty of quiet. You do not need to have a former secretary of defense talking about the current policies in a way that is injurious to the country. I would point out that secretary carter, my predecessor under the obama administration, did the same thing. It is not some protective effort around President Trump. David years down the road you might feel better about commenting . Gen. Mattis it is a good question, but i am from the west. There is something called your ride for the brand. I could always come out and say on this strategy i come out like this. While the president is there, the last thing we want is to have the former secretary of defense coming out and saying, i disagree with a certain policy. The president is still the commanderinchief. David does President Trump call you for advice anymore or not so much . Gen. Mattis the phone has not wrong on that one. [laughter] david you have recently come out with a book and it is a terrific book. I highly recommend it. Explain what callsign chaos means . Gen. Mattis i was a colonel in the mojave desert. I had an officer from brooklyn with a rather droll sense of humor. I had brilliant idea, talking to this officer out in the mojave desert. I saw on his whiteboard chaos written. I asked him what that meant. He said you dont have to worry about that. Oh yes i do. I used my powers of persuasion i waterboarded him. [laughter] they said my callsign should be chaos. It was rather tongueincheek. They did not see the brilliance of all my ideas so i adopted that as my callsign. Any time you hear about this mad dog thing, my troops all laughed at it knowing my callsign was chaos. That was never my favorite nickname. The press assigned it to me on a slow news day. David you never used the expression mad. You never explained how you got it. You obviously dont like it. Gen. Mattis the marines teach you to be tough in other ways than selfaggrandizing stuff like that. [applause] gen. Mattis one thing i have had to do and you will understand this, i sign a lot of next of kin letters and the last thing they need is someone with the selfimage of mad dog up there with their sons life in his hands. I shy away from those words. David you have signed more than 800 of those letters . Gen. Mattis i have. David you have been very involved in meeting with goldstar families. That must be a very emotional experience. Gen. Mattis this great big experiment we have that you and i call america, it is going to need to be defended. We need this commitment, this devotion to our country. David your first time in combat was when Saddam Hussein invades kuwait. When you got into kuwait, were you surprised at how easy it was to get there . Gen. Mattis it was a lot of trading and fire support. I am very proud of that campaign because the last time i brought everyone home alive. David so, when you started your life, you started in the northwest, washington state, and you were a great athlete or a great student, or which would you say . Gen. Mattis none of the above. David neither. [laughter] but you were a little bit wild. You would do things that today i would think parents wouldnt let kids do. When you were 13 years old, your parents would let you hitchhike around the west, is that right . Gen. Mattis well, i maintained a degree of silence about some of my activities around my parents. [laughter] but yeah, i did start hitchhiking. I think it was a more trusting nation in those days. My parents were rather adventurous. They werent irresponsible, and had they known some of this, they probably wouldve put the kabosh on it. David so, how did you actually come to the marines . Did you say, im going to be drafted. Id rather be in the marines than the army . Or did you, like my father, my father went in the marines and he said, i like the uniform. Its a great uniform. Im going to go in the marines. What was it that appealed to you . Gen. Mattis well, one thing was, i probably wouldve been drafted. It was during that era. But it was almost, a little bit unexamined. It was more or less just assumed that if you went into the military, a lot of the guys in my neighborhood, my older brother was in vietnam as a marine. It was just kind of a natural thing. It wasnt a very reflective or examined decision. David ok, so, you go into the marines. Now, what was your first assignment after you left officer training . Gen. Mattis it was the best assignment i had in the military. It was Second Lieutenant in the infantry. You have about 40 sailors and marines, and theres nobody between you and your troops. Youre living right amongst them. You know them as well as you know your brothers. You can spot them 200 yards away by their walk. You know who they are. Its just a great, tightknit crew. David ok, so your first time in real combat is when Saddam Hussein invades kuwait, and president bush 41, decides that the United States is going to have a response. [video] pres. Bush now, the 28 countries have no choice but to drive saddam from kuwait by force. We will not fail. David what was your involvement, and what did you do in that war . Gen. Mattis i commanded an infantry battalion. I was in the first marine division. And those of you who remember the war, you remember the big minefields and the trenches of oil and all that sort of stuff, barbed wire. And my battalion job was to open two of the routes through for the marines to follow. David and did you think at the time, there were predictions there would be tens of thousands of american troops killed. When you got into kuwait relatively quickly, were you surprised at how, relatively speaking, it was easy to get in there . Gen. Mattis it was a lot of training and a lot of fire support. And it was im very proud of that campaign because it was the last time i brought everyone home alive. David ok. You were an officer when that occurred. When youre an officer, you get special treatment when youre in that kind of combat . Do you sleep in the same place as the troops, or do you get a better place to sleep or better food . How do you treat your troops . Gen. Mattis no, in the infantry, you always eat last, you never live better than the troops. Matter of fact, even when i was a twostar general, we established whats called the level of comfort for a 23,000man division, which is whatever an infantry lance corporal, which is what a very young troop has. If he has nothing but a blanket to lay in, nobody has anything but a blanket except the wounded and the sick. And those, we do everything we can for. But everybody lives like a lance corporal. David so the food that you eat, mre food, is it any good, or not so great when youre in combat . Gen. Mattis lets just say its not quite as good as the meal we had today, david. [laughter] david eventually, you got back into combat again because 9 11 occurs. So, your next assignment is to go into afghanistan and try to capture, i assume, Osama Bin Laden, is that right . More or less . So, in the end, you go over there, you have all the troops. And why did you not capture Osama Bin Laden . Gen. Mattis i had an admiral who had read a lot of history. And he said, no ones held kabul in 500 years. Theyre going to fall back to kandahar, their spiritual home, and dig in. Can you get the marines from the mediterranean fleet and Pacific Fleet together, this threestar admiral asked me i was a one star marine and move against kandahar . I said, yeah, i can do that. So, we got the troops in. And then the Intelligence Agency said Osama Bin Laden was in one of two valleys. They were very sure of this. They had him pinpointed. So, i had a real quick computer study done, and i knew what mountains on the pakistan border, if you put troops on them, could see each other and block the two valleys. And then i was going to move my troops up the two valleys, but i changed from navy commandandcontrol to army commandandcontrol, and i had not spent the time getting to know my boss 900 miles away, and we missed the opportunity. The person who made the mistake was me. I just assumed, because we were there to go after this guy, that everybody was attuned to the intel. You shouldnt make assumptions like that when your organization is shifting and adapting. David they told you to pull back . Gen. Mattis well, they didnt tell me to go. We didnt pull back, but we didnt go in. David ok, so ultimately you leave afghanistan and come back to the United States again. Gen. Mattis right. David but then youre asked to go into another war in iraq. Gen. Mattis right. David so you get in there, and then ultimately the fights between the sunnis and the shiites turned out to be much more than anybody anticipated. As you look back on the political problems that arose in iraq, subsequent to Saddam Hussein having been captured, what do you think was the mistake that was made, or what could have been done better in hindsight . Gen. Mattis you know, its interesting to get the question, look back in hindsight, but let me tell you what it looked like in foresight. Were in, basically, the summer, a very hot summer of 2003, and iraq has fallen. And in one of my briefs one day, a young officer who was briefing said, by the way, the enemy is picking this up that somehow were going to disband the iraqi army. We were just bringing the army, the iraqis back into the barracks. We were starting to pay them, trying to talk with them that we werent here to occupy or humiliate you. You worked for a jerk, hes gone, youre going to be the new iraqi army. And i dismissed it as idle gossip and said forget that. Lets get on with the brief. Next day i walk in, and everybodys quiet in this great big cavernous palace wed taken over. The lieutenant down there had a piece of paper for me and it had three sentences, the iraqi army is hereby disbanded. The first lieutenant, fresh out of his undergraduate days, said, general, we just started an insurgency. Thats what it looked like in foresight. Didnt take hindsight to see the problem. David ultimately, when the insurgency occurred, you were trying to, at one point capture fallujah among other things, but you found there wasnt enough Political Support to go and do the tough things you thought the military needed to do, is that right . Gen. Mattis well, we had a troop cap put on us, so we didnt have enough troops. For example, i was responsible for an area about the size of north carolina, and i had about 15,000, 16,000 troops to try to control it. Just do the math on the geography, you can see the problem. Then we had four contractors who were misguided. They drove into fallujah without checking in with the marines who were in the area. And these guys, unfortunately, drove into town, right into the heart of town, and they were murdered by some of the tribes there, by the terrorists. And their bodies were desecrated, and, i mean, it was not pretty. And we were ordered to go in. I said ive got a better idea. We were told, no, after a couple of days you will assault the city. So, we had to move the innocent people out and then go after the terrorists, and i didnt have many troops i could throw into the attack. I said ok, were going to do it, but dont stop me now that were going to do it. Unfortunately, they stopped us while we were deep in the city and housetohouse fighting, so it was a very difficult time for the marines. David would you go back into government again, or are you done with Government Service . Gen. Mattis i mean, i grew up in a country that when the country calls, you do it. David as being former secretary of defense in more than 40 years in the marine corps, today, what do you think are the one or two most Important NationalSecurity Issues this country faces, leaving aside whoevers president . What do you think are the most Important NationalSecurity Issues and challenges . Gen. Mattis when i came into office, i was working alongside a son of texas, secretary rex tillerson. And together, we determined that we needed to rework the strategy. In my case, it was the National Defense strategy. And that strategy basically said were going to have to continue to deal with the terrorist threat. Its an ambient threat. Its just going to be out there. But the primary threats to the country, to go to your question, david, are clearly authoritarian regimes that are acting badly. And in terms of urgency, it would be north korea. In terms of power, it would be russia. And in terms of political will, it would be china. Were going to have to address those, so we wrote a strategy accordingly. David when do you think the United States will be able to, if at all, get out of afghanistan with our military . Gen. Mattis the point i would make is you can want a war over, you can even declare a war over, and you can even order troops home. And then theres something the military says, the enemy gets a vote. So, the idea that you can declare the war over, you can say its not going to bother me anymore, number one, those problems dont stay over there. And youre going to have to deal with the world as it is, not the way you want it to be. David would you say the same with respect to iraq . Do you think iraq is in a situation where we dont have to worry about whats going on there, or syria . Gen. Mattis we have to be engaged everywhere in the world. I think we need to intervene militarily with large forces less. But it doesnt mean you can disengage. The greatest generation came home from world war ii and said, its a crummy world, and whether you like it or not, were part of it. So the bottom line is, were going to have to get together with our allies and stick together with our allies because we need every one of them right now, and make certain we address these issues. It doesnt mean we have to do it all ourselves, but were going to have to stick together. David have you ever thought of running for office, maybe president of United States, yourself . Gen. Mattis youre a very bad man. [laughter] david because you dont want to do it . Why wouldnt you be a perfect person to be a candidate someday . Gen. Mattis there are a lot of great americans. I have great confidence in the american people. Ive never lost that confidence. We will find our way through rough patches, and well have great leaders. David alright, so suppose someone is elected president , whoevers the next president President Trump, or whoever might be the next president , and that person calls you and says, duty calls again, can you come back and serve your country one more time . Would you go back into government again, or are you done with Government Service . Gen. Mattis well, you can never say youre done because when the country calls i mean, i grew up in a country that when the country calls, you do it. But i would tell you that i think its also time for a lot younger people with fresh ideas. Good listeners, they have got to study history, listen to those who have been there before, but its time for young people to step forward. David but youre young. Compared to people running for president today, youre still very young. [laughter] gen. Mattis and im still at the top of my game, david. [applause] david alright, so for somebody looking to you, what are the attributes you think are most important for somebody to be a leader . What would you say some of those attributes are, to be an effective leader . Gen. Mattis follow George Washingtons example of listen to others, listen really well, learn from them. Then you help them, and then you lead. You dont just start off yelling at people or telling them what to do. And, i think, trust. Youve got to be able to build trust. If you can build trust, then you will delegate Decision Authority down below, and at that point, you start winning, because everybody feels like they own it. Theyre making decisions. You have made it clear what you want. But youve got to be able to build trust. Trust is the coin of the realm. That would be the key thing, can you build trust . David youve obviously given your life to the country in this sense and committed an enormous amount of time, most of your life to this. Any regrets about not getting married, having children, none of that . If youd been married, do you think you couldve done what youve done . Gen. Mattis i always had the idea, im getting out of the marine corps next year and then im going to get me a dog and get married and live happily ever after. I had my whole life planned, for you young people in the audience, i knew i was going to do my patriotic chore in the marines for my three years, then i was going to get out and go back to my hometown, teach physics and history in high school, and coach football and go fishing. I had it all figured out, and then along comes life, right . But i always thought next year im getting out of the marines. So i never made the decision not to get married. It just happened that way. But im still looking, if you know anybody. [laughter] [applause] david well, i think youd be a pretty good catch. A pretty good catch for some people, or anybody. So if i was a 17yearold or 18yearold and i wanted to go into the military, why should i go into the marines over the army or the air force or the navy . Why would the marines be better for me . Gen. Mattis [laughs] i spent too many years fighting alongside soldiers, living under air cover by the air force, being carried on navy ships. I truly love all the services. Obviously, you grow very fond of your own, but i would just tell you that after the military, no matter which one you go into, coast guard included here, you come out with a from that formative experience, with a much more sense of gratitude for everything you have in this country. The following is a paid program. The opinions and views expressed do not reflect those of bloomberg lp, its affiliates, or its employees. This program is a paid advertisement from u. S. Money reserve. A company not affiliated with the u. S. Government or mint. Markets for coins and bullion are unregulated. 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