Welcome to the huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science and science based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and Ophthalmology at Stanford school of medicine. Today, my guest is Jocko willing. Choco will Inc is a retired, Navy SEAL and author of numerous important books on leadership and Team Dynamics, and the host of the Jocko podcast during his 20-year career, with the US Navy, choco served was sealed.
Team 3 as commander of task unit, Bruiser in ramadi, Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East as well as deployments in Asia, and Europe. After retiring, from the Navy, choco used his experience and knowledge gleaned from his time in the SEAL Teams as a way to develop tools, that anybody can use to develop their leadership skills, both for leading themselves and for leading others. That took the form of several important books. The first of which was published in 2015 and is entitled extreme ownership, how US Navy,
Feels lead and win. He has also authored several books for kids about leadership, personal development and how to navigate various aspects of life. I've read both extreme ownership and the way of the warrior kid and I found them to be immensely useful in terms of actionable information and understanding of oneself and different kinds of relationships, both in and out of the workplace, typically guess on the huberman lab podcasts are scientists and or clinicians. It was some time ago that I was a guest on the
Jaco podcast and during the course of our conversation on his podcast, we quickly realize that many of the science-based tools that my laboratory has focused on and that I've used over the years and shared on the huberman Lab podcast had Direct overlap and parallel with many of the tools that Jocko and other members of the SEAL Teams had arrived at independently that is without knowledge of the underlying science. And in fact, he had many more tools that he had Incorporated during his years in the SEAL Teams as well as in business leadership in family.
Elsewhere, in life that I quickly realized it would be an enormously valuable conversation to have him on this podcast in order to share those tools with the general public. During today's episode, we discussed numerous tools that choco has taught and used over the years in a number of different contexts, including tools for generating more physical energy, and for generating more focus and cognitive energy. And for navigating sticking points, that is how to deal with lack of motivation, how to deal with difficult.
It's in the workplace and elsewhere and perhaps most importantly, how to think about and navigate the self. In fact, we spend quite a bit of time talking about this notion of the self and one's self identity and how self-identity plays into our ability to engage in actions of specific types. Consistently over time, where it can hold us back how to gain better perspective and how to help others gain better perspective so that we can work better with them and them with us, we also go deep into the likely scientific
Can isms underlying why the tools that Jocko teaches and uses are so effective. In fact, one thing that you'll immediately notice is that Jocko was writing things down and I was writing things down throughout the conversation and that just reflects the fact that he's not just an immensely powerful teacher. He's also a practitioner and an avid learner. He's always seeking knowledge. So, we kick back and forth, our ideas about what likely does and does not underlie different tools and techniques focusing. Of course, mostly on what
Works in the practical sense in the world, what I can assure you is that, by the end of today's episode, thanks to jacko's immense generosity and curiosity. You will come away with a large number of tools and much richer. Understanding of how to navigate and enhance mental health, physical health and performance, in all aspects of life. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to Consumer information.
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Us live momentous.com huberman and I should just mention that the library of those supplements is constantly expanding again. That's live momentous.com, hubermann. And now for my discussion with Jocko willing, Jocko will Inc. Welcome.
Thanks for having me, man. I'm
super excited and super happy to have you
here. I'm glad to be here. I know that you and I did five and a half hours on my podcast. So schedule is clear. Let's go, let's go and
actually
And people will see the Jocko go drinks. This is not some sort of promotional by me, but these are the energy drinks. I drink. So this could be called the bring your own go podcast. It is the energy. Drink I drink. And no, I'm not told to promote that or paid to promote. That's just the one that I drank. So there you go. No pun intended. I was just saying to our producer, a moment ago that rarely do. I sit down and do a podcast with somebody that's killed in podcasting.
Lex Freeman would be the only person that I've had on this podcast. I believe who's also a podcaster since you're a podcaster. Many other things I confess, I'm a little bit
intimidated. Well, it's a weird thing to actually call a skill because it's something that I just kind of started doing it. Something that you just kind of started doing it. Something that Lex just kind of started doing and I never practiced it. I didn't sit down before my first podcast and think about how I should deliver things. I just kind of did
It. So maybe it's just luck more than skill.
Well you and I actually go back further than that conversation that we had on your podcast. Think it might have been 2014 2015 and you were on the Tim Ferriss podcast. And the time, I was living with my girlfriend, we had moved from San Diego to the Bay Area. We're living in this little tiny apartment in a basement. In Oakland, trying to save up to buy a place or rent a place that was decent to live in. And we both know,
A lot of Team guys. She knew more Team guys than I did in San Diego and dated a few just to be direct great woman. Those guys were cool to me mostly and I remember when I saw the photo on the top card for Tim's podcast, it was, it was your face. I said, do you know this guy from San Diego? And she goes. Nope. But if you had to draw a Navy SEAL, that's what you draw. So I think for a lot of people you embody their notion of a number of different things, some of which you
Talk about but some of which when you open up a bit and really get specific about work in the military and work in daily life and what it is to be you, but really what it is to be a human being some important contradictions also emerge, right? Obviously discipline is a theme that people associate with you, right in my view and I think in the view of a lot of people you embody discipline. So today, I definitely want to talk about routines but also mindsets but also things that you do
In ways that you approach, things that might not contradict but not be so obvious to people might be a little bit counterintuitive. And in addition to that, you have a lot of different aspects to your life. In addition to running businesses, you're a family, man, you have children and married a long time. And so you have a lot of Knowledge from different domains of life. So, with your permission, I'd like to dive into all of them over the next twenty six hours.
Let's dive great.
I'm fascinated by this idea of sense of self. I feel like all of us can
look back to a time early, in life, when we first had some experience, could be in art, class could be fishing, could be sport, doesn't really matter what the exact experience was, but where we first realized that they're really cool things in the world. Like something turned us on at the level of excitement or maybe scared us, or something like that. Do you have any recollection of such an event? Maybe not the first one, but you ever remember hearing or seeing something as a young kid.
Maybe you could tell us how young and just thinking like more of that
please. A lot of times when people ask questions along this line of like when was there a moment right? When was there a moment that you realize discipline or when was there a moment you realize leadership or when was there a moment you realized attachment?
Kind of like the question your when was there a moment? You realized, for lack of a better way of saying it. I'm a person, right? I'm a, I'm a, I'm a person with my own thoughts and I can make things happen. And for me, all those answers are usually fairly gradual, you know, there's like a little thing that indicates, you get a clue and then you move a little bit further down that road. Then you get another clue and you move a little bit further down that road and you get another clue.
So that's what I would say for me life was like, you know, when you're when I was a little kid, I was kind of slowly discovering that I was a person. I was a human.
I remember, my mom took me shopping, I was probably about 10 years old and I needed to get pants for school. And my mom took me shopping. And when I went to into the store, there was a girl that was I don't know what they're called them to store a retail sales. Girl, she was probably about 16.
And I started chatting her up, right? And and I kind of recognize it a little bit, but I sort of didn't to and I just was chatting to this girl and I was making her laugh. I was having a good time with the whole thing and, you know, putting on the pants and spinning around like and she was laughing. And I remember when we left the store with the pants and my mom was sort of talking to me about the fact that, what were you trying to do to that girl? And I was I was thinking to myself
Well, I kind of liked that girl. She was pretty and I don't know why that popped into my head, but I just remember thinking, hey Ben, there's a whole world out there and let's go make it happen.
Yeah. It's a great story because it I think it really speaks to this thing that you mentioned, which is that when we first start to realize, we have a sense of self. It has something to do with cause and effect on the world, like we can have an impact in some way on, on things outside of us outside of our home. Yeah lately, I've been reading a lot of psychology and I've been listening to some of your
And I definitely want to talk to you about a study that you covered related to these. It's a brutal experiment with these kids that either had stutter or didn't have stutter, I want to get into that a little bit later. But you know what we do and how we treat people and how we receive feedback and give feedback has a big impact, but I think some of that happens just in our own relationship to things in the world. The old Hungarian psychologist. I'm learning how this idea of two kinds of people. They literally thought there were two kinds of people there.
Our generators and projectors and generators are people that are just from a very young age, they realize they can impact other people positively negatively. And they, they want to create things in the world. They want to generate stuff and I go, wow, I can actually build stuff and break stuff and blow stuff up. Maybe but also, you know, help things and and then their these projectors that like to
just kind of reflect on what they see and they made the really important point. I think that it's not the generators are good and projectors are bad. The world needs both that they really work in a kind of symbiotic way. But your story captures, the essence of what it is to be a generator, which is that, by doing certain things, you can have an impact and it feeds back to you and it's likely that they receive something from it as
well. Yeah. And where this all came to fruition as I as I now piece together as you're talking through this stuff. Look, when I joined the military,
You join the military and you get a blank slate. So no one cares where you came from, no one cares. What you did you were the captain of the football team captain, the soccer team. No one cares, no one cares. What your grades were, no one cares what you got on? The SATs or the end. No one cares about anything. You're a blank slate and then with that blank slate, it is. Hey, if you do this thing, if you perform this task and you perform it, well you will get recognition, you will get
You will hopefully get more control over your own destiny, which is the ultimate in compensation for human beings to have more control over your own. Destiny is the ultimate compensation, you know, you and I were talking before we hit record like you can have all the money in the world but if you don't control what you're doing every day or at least you don't control most of what you're doing, then it's not worth it. The reason people try and make money so they can have more autonomy in their life and so in the
Military. It becomes very clear and it became very clear to me very quickly that if I performed. Well, I actually got a lot more freedom with what I did, even in boot camp. You know, if you pass an inspection in boot camp, you don't have to redo your locker or you don't have to make your bed again because you did it right the first time. And so you have an extra 15 minutes and. And so, for me, really, that's when I started to realize, oh, what I'm doing right now? Is it going to impact, not only what's going to happen to me?
The next hour. But in the next two years, three years, five years. And I think that's the biggest myths that we have when we're growing up and and I know you had your challenges and tribulations as you were growing up because you didn't realize, oh what I'm doing right now is going to affect where I'm going to be in the future and it didn't happen until you were out of high school. When you went to Junior College and you're like, oh wait a second, I can actually put my life together in a positive way when you're 14.
You're thinking, hey, what I'm going to do tomorrow, that's basically future operations are. Literally, what about your heads for
Laura 14? I was like, where's where am I gonna get the Slurpee? Which curves, am I gonna hit skateboarding? And where we can play video games tonight, or what girls? Are we going to hang out with? That was kind of the mind, set it for
ya. And then at some point you you learned and so did I? Oh the way the the actions that I take now are either going to positively impact my future, they're going to negatively impact my future and the the more I focused on doing things that are gonna pause.
Impact my future, the better, my life became, I think that's a very huge lesson to learn that. I know I didn't figure out for quite some time
that the ID investments in withdrawals or understanding that early in life, in terms of health, behaviors, and intellectual behaviors. And, and your point about the military is a really interesting one. I never thought about the military that way that there's this Blank Slate when you get in there, and before we started, we were talking a little bit about the kinds of
Mindsets and people that the military attracts and I'd love for you to elaborate on that. Again, you mentioned something interesting, this notion of Garrison, interesting word in its own, right? What kind of people do you think the military attracts? And then within the military you start to see some kind of predictable bifurcations where certain people go down one track and other people go down another. I have a few friends from the SEAL Teams as we both know, and I've heard sometimes about the distinction between officers and enlisted guys, this kind of thing.
But maybe this question, I'm asking is more across the board for all of military and for really, for people listening whether or not they are interested in military or not for their own, for their own life. I think there's an interesting lesson, this idea of who is attracted to the military, is it like people who want to instill order on themselves or is it people want in Stillwater on other people or both?
Yeah, there's a, there's a really good book and I did I ended up doing about for podcasts on this book, which is called
The psychology of military incompetence. When I first saw that amazing title, I know. And when I first saw that title, I thought to myself. Oh, you know this is some some academic that's going to look at the military and Bash it and but I did a little research and it turned out that the guy that had written the book. I can't think of his name right now. He was a guy that had served in World War 2 was wounded. I mean, this guy had this guy under so what he was talking about and it's really an obvious concept. Once you think about it and his base, the basic premise is this
The military when you look at it from the outside. It's this orderly place. It's a place where everything has a place, it's a place. Where if you have a certain rank on your shoulder, you will command respect and people have to listen to you. That's what it looks like.
So it's an attractive place for people that have an authoritarian mindset for people that want to just hey don't don't, don't question what I'm saying? Just shut up and do what I tell you to do. There's people that love that, there's people that want to live like that. You've worked for them, I've worked for them, we've experienced that those type of people throughout our lives, that authoritarian mindset, that just want to bark orders and have people listen to them. And so, when they, when those people are 14 years old, or 16 years older, 18 years old, they look at the
Terry and they see a uniform and they say people saluting and they see orders being carried out and they think that's where I'm going to go and I can get the respect that I deserve.
And the military certainly attracts people like that and those people that have that highly disciplined and orderly mindset can do well inside the military especially in Garrison and I had to again we were talking about this earlier the word garrison. I don't think there's a civilian equivalent to this word but it basically means the non-combat situations. So when you're out on the parade field when you're when you're
Going through schooling where there's no combat involved when you're marching. Like, those kind of things, we call that Garrison. It's in the rear, it's not in combat and the people with an authoritarian mindset, actually, do pretty well in Garrison situations, why? Because things are orderly and you can predict what's going to happen and you do get a certain issue of gear and that gear is going to be delivered on time and you're going to shoot this number of rounds down at the range and everything is going to go according to plan, that's what Garrison is
Is.
And so those people join the military, they're attracted to that and they end up doing well in peacetime.
Now, unfortunately for them combat is a lot different. Nothing goes the way. It's supposed to go, the bullets don't get delivered on time. The enemy has a vote on the way things are going to unfold and you end up in combat in being in very chaotic situations. So the type of person that thrives in combat,
Has a more open mind has more flexible. Mind is paying more attention to the input that they're receiving as opposed to someone with authoritarian mindset. They don't listen to anybody else. They make up their own mind, they bark orders with someone that has a more open mindset there, listening. They're, they're taking input, they're evolving, their plan and those type of people excel in a combat situation. Now unfortunately, and this is sort of The Stereotype to you. Take that that dog
Of war and you put him back into a Garrison environment, he doesn't do well right. He's not showing up on time for the inspection, he doesn't have his, he doesn't get it, didn't get his haircut. He doesn't have his weapon clean the way. It's supposed to be clean because he's got his weapon ready for combat, not ready for inspection and and so you get this there are these two different types of people. And of course, with those two different types of people, there's degrees, going One Direction other. But what you hope for is someone that can play the game on the Garrison?
Side. And yet, when it comes time to go into combat, they can also open their mind, be flexible be creative. That's what you really want. Is you want someone that is very good at solving problems and to do that, you need to have a creative open, mind to figure out how we're going to do or something. So I think that's a stereotype. The Stereotype is that everyone in the military is sort of robotic and falling into the hierarchy and we bark orders and people follow orders and that's just not true.
There's an element of truth to it, but is not the whole truth. And certainly, if you look at it history, the people that are that excel in combat are the people that maybe have a little bit of a rebellious streak people that have that are just more creative and more open-minded.
Some of my friends from the SEAL Teams will sometimes, throw out stereotypes about the different divisions in the military. Is there any truth to this idea that, you know, Air Force types are one way and Marines are one way and navy is one way armies that certain way like sort of a general Contour personality or is that just kind of inside ball joking around?
It's a little bit of both. I mean certainly the Marine Corps is steeped in Tradition and you if you if you make a guess
Is that what a marine when you meet or if you had to had to guess what? I'm really going to be like you. You're probably gonna be pretty close. I mean Marines have a incredible program to indoctrinate their people into the culture of the Marine Corps, and the Marine Corps has an incredibly strong culture. It's a powerful culture. I love the Marine Corps. I've worked with the Marine Corps a ton and their outstanding as a generality. Certainly, you could make those assumptions about the Marines General do now, does that mean that every Marine is the same? No, absolutely not. Same thing with the Army say,
With the Air Force, same thing with the Navy, you've got these kind of stereotypes that exist for a reason. You know, it's interesting to it's one of my friends named Ben Milligan wrote, wrote an incredible book called by water beneath the walls which I've given him a huge hassle about because it's the worst title of all time but it's it's certainly the best book written about the SEAL Teams history and where the SEAL Teams came from and it's interesting. It's something that I had heard from a seal officer that had given a
speech years ago to change a commander. What he said was, Hey listen, he was trying to emphasize, why? The seal teams were good. And one of the things he said was, you know, in the in the Army he was talking historically, who is he in the Army? If you start to lose a battle, you can just Retreat run away in the Navy traditionally, we're fighting on board a ship and if that ship, if we can't run away, we're fighting and if we lose we die. So seals, can't quit. It was sort.
This you know, little over-the-top expression but when you take that a little bit further, when you look at the history of the Navy, if you're, you know, if we were in the Navy 150 years ago, you would have to go on deployment. You would take your ship and you would sail somewhere and you wouldn't be able to talk to me anymore. So you would have to understand what it is. You're trying to accomplish and then just go out there and make it happen. That's decentralized command. And that's something that exists in the seal teams without question.
Very decentralized command and that's one of the, one of the absolute strength of the SEAL Teams is, you've got leaders at every level inside the organization that if they don't know exactly. If they're not told what to do, they're gonna go. Okay. I don't have been told what to do but I'm gonna go figure it out and that's one of the strengths of the SEAL Teams. We don't. We also we have more doctor now but when I came in the SEAL Teams, there was no Doctrine, it was all word of mouth. And so the Army and the Marine Corps. If you have to conduct
An ambush. You can pull out a manual and you can look up how to conduct an ambush. Platoon Ambush. How to conduct it and it's all written very clear and they're great document since the fm7 tack 8th infantry, platoon and Squad. I think is the is the Army Doctrine.
And you see a little neurons in your hippocampus firing and see, it's embedded in there forever
and it's a great manual and you can pull that thing out. And you have a place to start from in the SEAL Teams, we didn't have that at all. So you would hear from your platoon Chief. This is how you
act an ambush and he had heard it from his platoon Chief, who heard it from his platoon Chief, who heard it from his between Chief and deputy chief was in Vietnam, so it getting passed down, but you can make adjustments to it and you, you can, you can alter the plan a little bit because, hey, the terrain is different or hey, the the night vision. We now have. So there's changes that we can make because there's no Doctrine
So not having any Doctrine in many ways is a strength. Also, it can be a weakness because if you've got a new platoon Commander, that's never done a an ambush before and he has no idea what he's doing. This platoon Chief has been out of the loop for a long time and he doesn't know what he's doing. There's no way there's no reference. So their strengths and weaknesses, just like any characteristic, right? Everybody's characteristic. You've got strength and you've got weaknesses and your weaknesses can be strengthened your strengths and weaknesses to get back to your original question.
Are there stereotypes inside of each of the military branches? Sure, but are there outliers in each of the military branches. There are absolutely. And that's why you can't judge a book by it's
cover for people listening, this who are not in the military. Maybe have some military lineage in their family or not. But who want to understand a little bit better about how structure and lack of structure can both support being effective in, in life in relationships and
In daily life in Fitness in business, in school. I think those are the big domains in Creative Endeavors. I think would be useful for them to understand a little bit about how you and particular balance discipline and structure with there is a lack of discipline and structure.
You could actually just say the word Freedom, right? Because because that's what it turns into.
Yeah or maybe even play, you know. I bring this up in part because I've seen some posts that you put up a view, you know, playing the guitar with friends or music one of
As a tribute to someone who I either was killed in combat or passed away. So, you know, what, these moments of connection between people sometimes are working together, but sometimes are in relaxation and play and these kinds of things. I think it was a really important post for people to see that. While jakka willing kicks back with a guitar, not trying to take over stages. Maybe you are, maybe have a plan and we could do it. You probably be the one, but what is the balance for you in terms of structure and lack of structure? And I'm not going to ask for your daily routine.
We know that you get up early, you train but I do have some specific questions. I think would be helpful in putting some meat on the kind of the Notions about you. And again this isn't a pic into your life but more to grab well it's to pick into your life. The so a question I asked you in Allah because it's one that, you know, having senior content for a long time and really benefited from it. I was curious you get up early at about 4:30 you train every morning. How long do you train for and is there any Global structure to that and of course, everyone?
Different programs but it do you is it like weight training one day, cardio, training the next day or you combining them as it always an hour, is it always half an hour? I think people would benefit from getting a little bit more understanding of what that looks like for you, with the caveat that everyone has different needs levels of background Etc. But I'm intensely curious about this and I'm certain, I'm not the only one.
So do you want to talk about weightlifting or rock and roll on the guitar? I want to talk about.
Let's your, let's talk about the most structured first part of your day and then let's talk about the least structured part of your day.
At least the part that you can share with the with the world.
Yeah, waking up early, and I'm going to work out and depending on what's going on that day. If I have an early flight, I might work out for 8 minutes, right? I might go in and do 2,000 meters on the roller. Get me, get a sweat going hard as I can, and then I'm done and because I got to go catch a flight so that could be happening. Maybe I'm supposed to go surfing in the morning, I wake up. The waves are terrible. And so now, I've got nothing to
To do of, I planned out, you know, to be surfing for two or three hours. And now, I'm not gonna go surfing. So I'm gonna go, I'm gonna go lift, and I'm gonna go play in the gym and do a bunch of stuff. I'm gonna spend two or three hours in there. I love doing that. So the workout could be anywhere between what I just say eight minutes and three hours and it could be anything in between. I am fully enjoy, the physical aspect of working out. So if I have more time to spend in the gym, I'll spend it.
I remember my dad saying at one point if I retired, I wouldn't know what to do, and I thought I was thinking myself, are you serious right now? You know, if I didn't have anything to do, I'd spend six hours a day in the gym, it's been four hours doing Jiu-Jitsu like I could fill my day. I could fill every day with just physical activity, things that I just like doing, but that's so wake up early. Get a sweat going and do I lift. Yes. Do i do cardio? Yes. Do I run? Yes, to a Sprint. Yes.
Do I lift heavy weights? Yes, do I swing kettlebells? Yes, I I do everything and anything and I enjoy all of it and I'm not really good at any of it. You know, I'm not I'm not really good at any one aspect of physical activity. I, there's people that are infinitely better at me in every aspect of and I'm not just talking about oh this guy's a world-class them do. I'm there's like a guy named Fred down at the gym that can deadlift more than me. There's a guy when I was at Seal Team to there was a guy who was
Probably 57. And he look kind of chubby and he was older than me and he could run faster than me, and he could
bench more than me. Those guys are out there. It was just
so bothersome.
Yeah, they're out there. They did. They got some engine in there related to something. I mean, I do think there are genetic differences in terms of people's resilience and work out, but even just grip strength is highly. Highly subjective like genetic influences maximum grip strength. But of course, there's a huge range in what people
and develop, but I guarantee your grip strength is greater than mine. People ask me this all the time who would win in arm wrestling between you and jogging, my Jocko when injured isn't Jocko, you know, there's
a lot of technique in arm
wrestling. I have to imagine they're putting their body behind it. They're putting their,
their backers that like, there is legitimate technique in arm wrestling there for me yet. Yeah. There's, there's no like, if we could bring a female arm wrestler in here, that knows how to arm wrestle because I don't know how to arm wrestle either. And she would be both of us because there's a lot.
There's a lot more technique in arm wrestling than, you know, then most people recognize, there's all these little games that are going on. There's all this little arm position that you get. So just like everything else. It's technique. There's a lot of technique in arm wrestling.
That's good to know. I didn't know that about arm wrestling and I think we all start off with some genetic predispositions, both good and bad for different things. And then there's as far as we know, there's a huge range based through neural plasticity in muscle adaptation, Etc, in what we can obtain. So, never, want genetic predisposition
To serve as a barrier. No one knows also what the upper limits of any of these things are and some of the best examples we know from Sport and certainly from Academia, are people who knew they were at a disadvantage and just worked 10 times harder than everybody else because they had an axe to grind with their genetic disadvantage, which is really cool. And at the face of it, I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors. Athletic greens, athletic greens. Now called a G1 is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink that covers all of your foundational nutritional needs.
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Vitamin D3 k 2 so you get you get the training and do track your training and in a detailed way. Are you keeping track of lists? And
so I write down what I do and I'll write down, I write down what I do every day and that way I can go back and say, you know, what was I doing back then? Because I might go through some phase where I'm trying to do more pull-ups or I'm trying to deadlift more and I'm trying or whatever. The, whatever the thing is, I'll go back in because of the board of deadlifting after a while and it let's face it. If you just want to be a good deadlift or you're not,
Going to be that fast, right? You're going to be slow on long runs so you don't want to go too deep into deadlifting and you'll also don't want to be so good at long runs that you can't deadlift, you know, a good amount of weight so I got to go through phases and I'll get into something for a while and I'll get into something else. So I do log down what I'm doing. So I can look back and say, oh dang, you know I I'm not even close to a strong as I used to be need to get back to that.
I'm fascinated by the concept of energy. I think it's one of the most interesting aspects in all of biology, all of us.
Algae in all of life. And when I say energy, I mean the distinction between being back on your heels flat footed or forward Center of mass, you know, and I get the impression and I think everyone gets the impression that you're somebody with a lot of energy and I wonder whether or not you wake up with a lot of energy and you feel like you have to burn it off with this physical activity and work and other demands in your life. Or do you find that you wake up and your energy is kind of neutral and
Sighs and physical activity gives you energy because I think this is one of the key things out there. I think that acts as a barrier for people doing more with their body because they maybe they don't want to Tire themselves out, or maybe they don't feel like they have enough energy to begin with. It's also feeds into this idea that you know, some people just have a lot of energy there, really, physical, and other people aren't so on. Let's just say, on most days. Do you wake up feeling like you want to burn off, energy, build energy, what is X?
Sighs mean to you. And then maybe we could talk about some of the underlying stuff going on there, because I think we both might find it
interesting. I would say it's both. Right, there's no way I can sit here and say, oh yeah, everyday that alarm clock goes off and I'm like, oh yeah, let's rock and roll. Certainly, that's not the case. It's also certainly not the case that every day, I'm like, oh God, not again, no, that's a most. The time the alarm clock goes off and I don't think a bunch, like, when my alarm clock goes off. I don't, I don't think a bunch. I don't debate with myself. I'm not negotiating.
I just think it was off and I'm doing what I'm supposed to do sort of robotic. Now I this this much I can say. When you go and workout, you're going to feel better. You will get energy from working out you. That is, that is a guarantee. If you go workout, you're going to feel better. If you go break a sweat, you're going to feel better, this, you're gonna get more energy from it. And look, you gotta go really, really hard to wear now you feel more tired when you're done and even that I mean, you got to go psycho.
I'll do that occasionally but I don't do that on a daily basis. You know, at the end of the day, if I Wake Up, Lift run Surf, and then I do Jujitsu in the afternoon like at the end of that day, I'm tired and I feel tired. But normal day working out just makes you feel better. Get definitely gives you. It definitely gives me energy. I should say because I guess I'm not
everybody. Yeah. It's I think it's a very important point because one of the things that we are learning from
from circadian biology, you know, time of day, effects and sunlight, all that stuff that we talked about in our podcast that you've done intuitively, right? There's what we have arrived to its kind of crazy. Last time we had a conversation is that so many of the things that science is telling us to do in that we emphasize on the podcast? This podcast, you've been doing or are built into military schedules and one of them is this notion of waking up early and getting physical early in the day. And I suppose, if we were to just throw one blanket rule on the table to Encompass the broadest number of themes.
That once every 24 hours we each and all get a big increase in this release of the hormone cortisol which everyone says. Oh cortisol, it's terrible. You know, he's going to burn you out, adrenal burn out all that stuff. But it's a non-negotiable peak and you want it to arrive early in the day and viewing sunlight, physical activity caffeine. And in particular intense exercise, all amplify that cortisol peak. In fact, I think it's the numbers I'm seeing is
Just sunlight viewing gives you a 50% increase in that course all exercise. On top of that, another 50 to 75 percent increase. So this huge release in this hormone that everyone thinks is terrible but actually sets his huge wave in motion for the rest of the day which gives you more energy, higher levels of immune function more focused Etc and does indeed as you mentioned in your example of your daily life sets a timer. So that about 14 to 16 hours later you're sleepy which is what you want 14 to 16 hours later. Unless of course, you're running vampire shifts in the
Leterrier, you're on shift work, but most people aren't, of course. So I think the idea that movement and exercise gives us energy, I think is an important idea. And it's something that I was frankly, I was hoping your answer would be that, as opposed to that. You know, you wake up every day and you just want to just attack the world because you have so much energy getting out of bed because frankly, I never feel that way. But I always feel better after I trained always and of course there are times when I crash in the early afternoon, if I train really, really hard.
But usually, that's when I over caffeinate to an outrageous degree and then I don't nourish after or I over nourish. So this is the other thing that eating the whole rest in digesting the digest word in there is meant to for there. For a reason which is that when we eat a really big meal, we actually need to slow down. So I hate to get into daily schedules at the level nitpicking and nutrition is about the most controversial topic on the internet. But do you nourish after you?
Train and if you do, do do it to the point where you kind of like, okay. I'm mostly full or I'm for you trying to eat like really nourish yourself or do you find that eating slows you
down? I find that eating slows me down and I would say again this it's weird how some of this stuff is like the main reason I got in the habit of waking up early and working out is because if you do it before, anyone else is awake, then they can't bother you and you can get stuff done, right? You go to the Seal team, and you get there before anyone else is there. No, one can say, hey, can you help us with us? Hey, no.
I sent you an email to you, get you get that time, you get it done and and it's yours, right? I remember when you were on my podcast and I don't wear sunglasses when I run in the morning because I sweat. And it fills my sunglasses. It's not because I want to let the UV light into my eyes. That's not cortisol, be right? It's not for the cortisol. I didn't know that it's cool, that I know it now, but I just did it because I don't like to do sweat in my sunglasses, can't see. So, I just run without and put a hat on as far as eating.
I don't like to do Physically Active things with food in my stomach, that's just the way it is. Yeah, me and so I don't want it. And what really keeps that in line for me is I'm doing Jiu-Jitsu in an afternoon and so if I'm eating a big lunch by the time, the afternoon rolls around, I'm kind of, I got food in my gut and I just don't like that feeling so no. I don't eat a big meal until I'm kind of done with the physical stuff for the day which is usually at night 6:00 7:00 at night, which I guess there's some bad things about that. I eat too.
Late. Well, the data say, you know, if you're yeah this could we could go down a rabbit hole at this and then someone's going to pull up some little clinical study. And then another one that counters that I mean, I think the data essentially say that having a regular meal schedule that allows you to sleep well at night, whatever that means for you and that allows you to be active and focused when you need to be active in focused, that's the ideal schedule. I
when I'm working with clients like Star, the leadership consulting company Echelon front, when I'm going to work with a client. I'm not eating because because there
Ask me questions were to be diving into what's happening inside their business. Like, there's a lot of stuff going on. It's a lot of cognitive work, so I'm not eating for podcast. I'm not eating before. A podcast before recording podcasts, I'm not eating because I don't want to have a bunch of food in my stomach, I want to you get a certain level of mental Clarity when you haven't eaten a bunch of food. So, going out on missions, I never would eat. Before I go out on a mission, I would eat when I come home, you get home for clock in the morning, 3:00 in the morning, from do an operation called, then I'll eat. Because then I'm going to, I'm going to do a debrief for
Teen minutes, clean weapons and then eat a big meal go to sleep. Cool. Yeah. I don't want to have food in my stomach when I've got to perform or execute anything. So, again, I think that's just kind of a fluke that I ended up living like that. But that's kind of how I live. It's a fortunate
fluke for all of us because because so much of what you embody and what you do. I think centers around this idea of discipline of course, but also energy. It's, it's the intuitive sense I get about why people
People are so drawn to your messaging and what you do and how you do it.
Energy. We know of course is caloric energy. I think that's what most people default to, they go that how many, you know, calories or energy and how many calories in that unique calories to fuel things. But the energy that you're describing I think is the one that? Well it really maps to Eastern Traditions more directly though yin and yang Yin and Yan, I always get that wrong. So which is the notion of neural energy. And so there's a particular cluster of chemicals in us as a fancy name called the catecholamines, but that's dopamine.
An epinephrine which is adrenaline and norepinephrine and then you've got cortisol and those for hang out together and basically give us enough energy to run our brain and body for 50 days, 50 days. So the idea that you have to eat before you train sure for some people that might work better than others. But I think what people don't realize is that any time we're taking in caloric energy, it takes neural energy in order to digest that and put it into storage. And so the way you describe your day of? Yeah, I also don't eat me.
Train like to hydrate and caffeinate, I have been drinking these before. I drink, I have to limit myself to to before because otherwise I like picking up Mall ready quaking a little bit at the second one, but I have a pretty high caffeine intolerance. So I like to train fast at also, and then I find it gives me energy but then the moment that I eat a meal, that's a little too large, all of a sudden, I'm, I'm out of energy and what's the deal? This calories or energy, right? You're supposed to have energy in order to think and move and I think I think a lot of the world has this backwards and this isn't a push for intermittent fasting or
Any particular style of eating? Really? I don't care if people are carnivore. Vegan doesn't matter to me? Whatever works. I happen to be an omnivore, but I think once people understand that energy to do things is mineral and yet of course, it relies on having glycogen and all this stuff around. But neural energy is what's really about then your schedule in the way you function in the way, you described your schedule, really makes a ton of sense, so you described getting up and lifting running surfing and Jiu-Jitsu in the same.
So on a day like that, you're hydrating, correct. Oh yeah, because that's vital and I know in the teams in the SEAL Teams, there's a lot of discussion about hydration as important, even though you guys I know are supposed to be able to like eat sand and survive on sunlight and dirt and like drink your own blood, you know? It's hydrations could taken seriously,
right? Yeah. And and different people need different amount of hydration and I unfortunately was one that I always needed to bring a lot of water in the field, which sucked because water is heavy, and I have friends. One of my friends, Tony BTF Tony, he go in the field.
It with like a can of Copenhagen and coffee and his canteen go like three straight days as it hurtles a Desert Rat. Man, you could just survive and I would always have to bring us on a modernized. I sweat a ton when I work out or when I'm doing anything that requires physical physical output. I'm going to, I sweat a tan. So I have to drink a lot of water for sure, but not everyone's the same, you know?
Yeah. I think if most people focused more on hydration and movement,
They would find they have to I'm going to venture a guess here is not a scientific study but two to four times more energy than if they focused on caloric energy and what to
eat. Yeah and I think the cool thing about this, you know, you're using the term energy. And what's cool about this is
You or I I create energy, right? I create energy by, like I said, by going to the, by going to lifting in the morning by going and doing burp. You go do burpees. You go to 100 burpees like, you're creating energy. You're going to be tired. You're going to be sweating but you just created energy. So that stuff is is totally true. I'm glad there's Neuroscience to back it up. Yeah. I'm actually thinking about
devoting some of my lab to this you know one of the best examples, another familiar territory for you is cold water. You know, nowadays there's a lot about ice passing cold
Pause and showers and all that. And I always like to just say it listen it's all just a reliable source of inducing, adrenaline release and you get out of a cold shower, you have more energy and that energy couldn't have been caloric energy. It's adrenaline. And I, you know, again, I'm it's fair to say I'm obsessed by the ideas of identity, which is a little bit how we started off and I want to get back to it and energy. I feel like identity and energy can account for 75% of what it is to, you know, live a good
Life. If you can Master those because then it all seems to fall into bins. It's like of course, you need sleep, why will to restore your neural energy right at some point, you just fade out of neural energy if you don't sleep. So sleep then falls into a particular bin with a particular purpose and then exercise becomes not a way to like burn energy, but as you said to create energy, we actually are starting to understand why this is if you'll indulge me for a second. On some Neuroscience I, we didn't talk about this last time. We have neural circuits that control deliberate action. We have neural circuits that control.
Deliberate actions that we forget that we're doing like walking and then we have neural circuits which are called Central pattern generators. And these are the neural circuits that love to just work on their own and in the background just kind of hung in the background and take care of all the stuff like heartbeat breathing and movement that is repetitive. Like if you if you're just marching and you don't have to adjust your Cadence much or maybe your hiking even and step in this Rock that Rock once those Central pattern, generators, get going. It's very automatic and we know that one. So Central pattern, generators, get going there.
The release of those catecholamines, those three or four molecules that then feed all the other neural systems, they're called, neuromodulators for a reason because they set the gain higher. So when you go out for a run or a jog, or a hike or something and where you pedal or you row and then your whole system is at a higher RPM. So when you say create energy, neuroscientists are starting to understand what that is repetitive movement that allows you to forget, the motor commands that are required to generate that movement. You might think about your row stroke.
Or something like that, but you can do it without thinking much, you come off of that and you now are set at a higher RPM to do more deliberate stuff. And none of this again, involved like eating enough carbohydrates are making sure you had enough ketones or enough protein. Like it's like you got plenty of that stuff. Provide you nourish at some point every 24 hours or so. So we we I think we know a little bit about the science behind Jocko will inks schedule now, but I will ask this are there certain forms of
Sighs like weightlifting versus cardio that you find give you an especially Big Boost in what we're calling energy and here, this could be cognitive energy, could be physical injury but Readiness for the next thing.
Yeah, first I got to back you up on this island. Backing up your your your science. So you ever do have a ruck march like, put on a heavy weight and
you started interrupt. Yeah, Peter Atia got me into this. He got me into doing a long Sunday instead of a long Sunday Run throwing on a light weight vest or a Ruck.
Going out for like three hours and the first 20 minutes, I find I always want to go faster and get it over with, but then I learned that the real pain in it sets in around an hour. And then the beauty sets in around 90 minutes real, like, I could do this all day, all night, and I never want to
stop. See that's when you were describing how this chemical, these chemicals get released and once you're in that automatic mode because in the SEAL Teams, you're doing maritime operations for a month and then you're going to do some
How shooting and you're not carrying a bunch of weight and then you go out to the desert and now you're putting on 80 pounds and you're going on like day one. And you get out. There you go on an 80-pound ruck march and the first freaking 17 minutes, the first 23 minutes, just suck, they just suck. And it was beautiful as by the time I was, you know, 23, 24 years old about, oh yeah, this is going to suck for 17 minutes and then it's going to be, I'm going to be a robot and it doesn't matter anymore. I can just keep going forever. So it sounds like what you're saying
Is what I experienced my, basically, my whole adult life. There's going to be a little break in Period, mentally. We're you think this totally sucks and then you just can keep going for a really, really long time and it's not that big of a deal to your question of, is there any form of exercise that gives me that energy book. I would have to say like the the high-intensity sort of anaerobic blast you know whether it's on the bike or on the rower or you know swinging a kettlebell hard, something like that. That last 10 15
15 minutes, that's a really good way to, you know, Peak my mentality for the day. Do you do the
cold water thing? I mean, need to certainly do a lot of it and buds. I mean, do you force yourself into cold
water? I realize I have a, I have a cold bath of my house and I get an everyday. Yeah, how long are you spending in there? Usually around 5 minutes, 5 minutes before you train or afternoon after. So this is something I haven't played with yet. And for me I'm like I'm like such a
II. Don't like to make a bunch of effort for something. So for me, going downstairs, getting in the ice tub and I guess you only need to do it now before you workout, you only goal minute
right. Do minutes at three Joe and I have been texting back and forth about this. There's a lab at Stanford. Craig Heller's lab that works on cold and performance and the athletes at Stanford mainly to the cross country team in the football players are doing cold before their training, because of the huge increase, huge long-lasting increase in dopamine and adrenaline that is caused by that. They're finding it increases.
Performance, mainly by waking people up and getting them phony. It creates energy, basically, and students, you know, everyone thinks of like, oh, athletes are all super motivated, this is no pick against Stanford athletes. In particular, a lot of athletes are excellent at what they do because they're very lazy when they're not training. This is true. Not all athletes but a lot of athletes are. And so they're really good at resting and recovering so they can train more, but a lot of athletes have a hard time getting into into gear to train every day. And the cold is a great stimulus, right? It's a force. It's like a four shot of espresso.
Kind of stimulus without all the Jitters.
I think, maybe going in there for a minute, would be cool before workout. I will say this. So I had I had like a long workout and it was a Saturday which means on Saturday I do Jujitsu kind of in the morning around 10:00 and I have like a long workout went for a long run. It was hot and I just got in the ice bath. And I sat in there for like seven minutes, like the Deep chill. I got out and I went right to jiu jitsu and I felt awful. I feel
So absolutely awful like tight cold and it took me an extra three rounds to get warmed up again, so that kind of left a bad taste in my mouth for pre-work icing, but I'm going to try the shortcut was talking to another friend of mine, they're like, oh no, only go a minute before. Maybe I'll give that a try.
If it's really cold, 30 seconds to a minute is going to get you the this big release and adrenaline and dopamine
actually one time I did try, you know, the
The the chamber that blast cold air on you the cry. Oh yeah. The cryo and I did that for like a minute or whatever and that did make me feel pre-workout, pretty
good. Yeah, I think that the whole notion of cold for metabolism. You know, people say well, it's not that big of an increase in metabolism. But as far as I'm concerned, the main function of the cold for most people is going to be the discipline of doing it. The sense of resilience that you can build up over time, just being familiar with having an adrenaline in your system and
And the fact that the dopamine increases are huge and long lasting. I mean, they're like 2.5 X increases. At there's a colleague of mine at Stanford on lmq. Runs are dual diagnosis, addiction Clinic. Should a patient getting off cocaine, addiction who decide to use cold ice baths as a way to kind of assist himself along the way. You know, it wasn't getting dopamine from cocaine anymore, so he decided to get it from the ice bath. The difference is, is cocaine gives you these sharp increases and then decreases, the drop you way below Baseline. So what do people do if they go seek more cocaine? It's really pernicious that way, whereas the ice bath and
And cold showers will give this long Arc, lasting two to three hours or more, and that's really something to treasure. You know, the idea that you can basically save on your heating, bill, you know, give yourself this huge dopamine increase and I think everything points to the fact that it's healthy and good, but I mean, obviously, it's working for you to do after your training. I think all the gym rats, who want more hypertrophy, you're trying to get an extra, you know, eighth of an inch on their tricep or whatever they freaked out. Because they hear that it can inhibit hypertrophy. And then, for whatever reason, there's this cat. So am I?
It
wrong well, I mean yeah, get clearly you're doing it right now. No, you're not. Your I don't think your hypertrophy is suffering. I actually am of the mind that if you're training really hard, sure getting in the cold afterwards, might blunt some hypertrophy that is what the data tell us. Andy Galpin is kind of the expert on that literature. But frankly, I don't know anyone that trains really hard with the weight and then gets into the cold. That looks like they're suffering from hypertrophy. I
know a lot of people,
however, who love to point fingers,
Hers at and poke at Cold exposure. This seems to be a big thing on social media. People who don't like the cold love to point out the studies showing that the cold screws up everything. And most of them look like they need a few sets in the gym to me and, you know, and I feel comfortable poke at them because I feel like all of these are just tools, right? And in any case, I'm a big fan of deliberate, cold exposure, mostly for the neural effects. Again, I'm obsessing over this concept of energy and it's something that I can't help but ask is that it is the cognitive side of this and
One of the effects of winning and losing so you obviously have a lot of deployments and a lot of wins, whatever in the context that meant, right? Kill the target capture, the capture, the hostage cetera, and then as is the case with war, there have been some cases of losses, right? You've lost people. Maybe there were targets that weren't accomplished, right? This kind of thing you posted about these. And these are always, you know, things that are hard to see. But I
and it's really
important that you post about people that you've lost, write it. Because first of all these people served, but second of all that things don't always work out the way that we wanted sometimes to really catastrophic consequences.
There's a theory in biology that when we win we somehow get more energy to win, more through the release of surprise dopamine and some related molecules. And in fact, testosterone in both men and women is another close cousin of the dopamine system actually released from the same general or the patterns of release or from the same general areas in the brain. Believe it or not, and body. But when we win, we feel like we can keep going. Are you look at the team that wins and it's like, don't play another game. The Super Bowl winners. Are you mad?
Jumping up and down and they could probably play another Super Bowl.
Losing, we know, can sure can drop things like testosterone and dopamine for some period of time. But when you were in the teams,
What was your observation about how winning and losing would impact people in the short and long term? In other words, Would You observe people that had a quick reset button and could just say that was terrible and then transmute, I guess I'm getting into kind of ate the, the Eastern language. Now to convert that into energy to go do better the next time, whereas we also see people military and in the civilian world that a loss in particular, severe losses based.
We set them down the path of like less energy, and certainly is in less calories. In fact, most of the time, it's the other way. They start consuming more calories and that doesn't get them going. So again, this notion of energy and now I'm asking wins versus losses. What did You observe? And from the perspective of leadership and maybe more importantly, from the perspective of yourself, how do you work with that? How do you calibrate wins and losses? How do you transmute losses into energy? Because when the Reno convert to energy but loss is often times can sap our Energy Way.
Way
down.
I think.
To start with I think that the selection process to get into the SEAL Teams is going to weed out a bunch of people that can't recover very quickly from something bad. So you probably heard these type of stories before the kid that was the star of the football team, the star of the basketball team, the captain of this, the captain of that. He's been winning his whole life. He goes to Buds and he quits, because in buds, you're you're not going to win. You're certainly not.
Going to win everything. They're going to find what you're not good at and they're going to exploit that and you're going to lose this. What happens? So a lot of guys that may lose and it disrupts their their motivation, they're probably just going to quit. And so that's why you get this massive attrition rate with guys that are studs. I mean, we're talking.
Division, one athletes Division, 1, athlete Division, 1 wrestlers division, one football, players division, one Runners, and swimmers, they all come to buds, they all quit, not all of them quit but there's plenty of examples of the highest level of Collegiate athlete in sports, that translate very well to what you're doing in basic SEAL training and they quit and sometimes it's because they don't know how to lose. They don't know how to recover from a loss and they're just so. So I think already and once you
Get to a Seal Team, you've got people that are generally speaking. Going to be pretty resilient when it comes to dealing with a loss. Not only that. I mean, you just get used to you. Talk about losing people, your friends with this guy, you meet this guy and Seal training. Hey, this guy seems like a stud. Oh, he's just going to quit and you're going to lose five, six, seven people, eight people, people quit so fast. You even keep track of them, so you're just going to lose you just gonna get used to it.
So there's that. Now once you're in the teams and what you're talking about is now you start taking much more significant loss or not losing a race. You're losing it, one of your friends and this is what from a leadership perspective, you have to, you have to pay attention to. So when you're in a leader in any organization,
You're basically in charge of a mob when it comes to, what their morale is there? A mob? And they feed off of each other? Just like a mob riding in the streets. Going to, we can break this window. Let's break all the windows, and they move this mob mentality. And that happens with morale inside of a team. And you as a leader, can't get caught up with the mob. You can't let that happen. You have to detach yourself from the mob mentally so that you don't get caught up in their emotions and their morale,
Because if you get caught up in their emotions and you get caught up in mirat their morale, you can't correct it. So we go out on a mission, the mission goes great, we get into a gunfight, kill, a couple bad guys, everyone's okay, high fives, everyone's feeling great. You come back to base. Hey, we don't need to debrief. That was perfect. Hey, we don't need to get our gear, you know, maintain. We can just go to bed. We're awesome. That's when the leader has to say, oh, we've got the mob and the mob is becoming
Slightly arrogant. Hey guys, real quick. That was a good op but there's some things we could improve on. You got to bring that mob back and bring them back to Center Line. Same thing in the other direction. You go out and operation. It doesn't go. Well you go out an operation, you take casualties. Now you come back to base. You see guys moping around, you see the spirit starting to break and same thing, if you get, if you're part of that mob, you'll be you'll be with them. Your morale will be breaking your spirit, we breaking. You had to look and say, oh, I see.
See what's happening. Hey guys, listen up, that was tough, didn't go the way we wanted it to go, we need to learn some lessons. Here are some things I can do better, what can we do better to make sure that that never happens again.
What can we do to make sure we have the opportunity to go out and avenge our brother on the battlefield? What can we do to move this thing forward? So as a leader, when it comes to winning and losing, you're generally going to be the person countering what the mob mentality is, because when the mob starts winning, they want to keep winning and they might get arrogant. When the mob is losing, they might start to lose more because their attitude goes down the drain. So that's what you have to pay attention to from a leadership perspective.
For for me personally.
I think I know what I did when when I lost guys was focused on, all right? We need to we need to celebrate the life. We need to move the law mourn, the loss.
And then we need to go to work. We need to get our gear back on way to Lock and Load our weapons. We need to get back out there. I know that, that's what we need to do, you know? So often
the best way to contend with with problems with issues with adversity is action is by taking action. The more you sit and the more you wait. And the more time you spend with that adversity, with the upper hand inside your head, the worse it's going to get. So for me, always taking action making something happen, it doesn't have to be huge. It doesn't have to be some Mammoth, you know?
No Triumph that you're going to go and go and pursue. But if you say Hey listen
This what happened didn't go. The way we wanted it to where to get our gear back on. We're going to go back out. We're going to do this other Mission and that's that's what I think, I think taking action and it's in a in your personal life too. You know, something doesn't go the way you wanted it to go. You didn't get the job. You wanted you to get the higher, you can get the promotion, you can go home and sit there and and, and dwell on it. That's not getting you any progress or you say, okay, you know what? We do a quick analysis. Why didn't I get that promotion? Oh, it's because I didn't get this qualification or I hadn't
Jumped through this gate. Okay cool. What I need to let me look into how do I how do I get to jump through that gate? So next time I will get the commotion, you start taking action. So action for me is a cure for a lot of problems that we have in
life.
I love this because the image that's arising my mind. I'll share it with you and tell me where it agrees with and maybe violates what you're telling me. But what I was imagining it, when you're talking about leadership in the mob is, you know, a bunch of candles, but not wax candles, these are oil candles you talking about a win. So you know, it could be an op, go out and win, it could be a team, it could be an individual taking an exam and they get an A+ or what doesn't matter.
But they're riding High. I mean, those winds we know crank up those catecholamines and it says, if the intensity that flame starts going up as a consequence that's natural, but the oil in the candle, is continuing to burn down like you need to celebrate wins, but you're burning that oil. And so what we're really talking about here is how to moderate and then reclaim energy and I was imagining you as the leader who's like, okay guys, great, but listen, you're burning that oil, right? That oil is what you got, you the win, let's not just clamp it like we can you know, do it.
You know if you this bumps and you know maybe celebrate and some other ways but then let's read let's take the energy we got and put it to the next thing rather than just go crazy drugs of abuse in particular drugs that tapping the dopamine system, namely, cocaine and amphetamine and just because there's no way to avoid this. If we're being true to the biology the the energy, the dopamine system was designed for foraging for all sorts of things food. So, people that overindulge food or seek out food sex, people that over indulge in these things, they
Those things. And again this sort of means to Eastern philosophy a bit but there's Western Neuroscience or Neuroscience. We should just say to support it. You start to deplete these dopamine systems. The Baseline starts to drop and so I'm imagining that the leader you in this case is saying, like, listen, let's tone it down. Use the energy that we've gained and put it to good use, rather than just burn it up, enjoying it. And then, of course, went after a loss when those I sort of think of the candles going dimmer and the but the oil Reserve is still there and it's like how do you start to tap?
At back into the oil Reserve. Well, you have to actually wrap the candle up again. You can't just sit there waiting for the you know, the intensity the flame to come back. You actually have to do something in order for that to happen. So, maybe this isn't the best analogy because it lacks sort of like the exactly what is that the person turning the intensity up and down on these candles, but that's what comes to mind and in eastern Traditions. There's this idea of chi of energy energy to fight energy to seek mates, energy a seek food energy, for sex, energy to, for all of it is the same energy and I actually
That the energy that they're referring to are these catecholamines I really do. Now, there are other Energy Systems to relating to child rearing pair-bonding. Oxytocin all the kind of like fuzzy warm stuff, that's super important and we wouldn't exist as a species the way we do. If, if we didn't honor that Energy System also and that energy system that we normally think of as love as opposed to forward Center of mass synergizes with this system, right when you're working with in training with and people that you love, this could be your, your brother's your sisters.
Esther's whatever your family there is. I think there's an amplifying effect on this whole thing, right? If it's just for more dopamine, just for more money, just four more wins just for more trophies. I'll never forget this as an aside when I was a kid. I had this weird experience where Tony Hawk dad rescued me from a skateboard contest. In Linda Vista, the Linda Vista Boys Club, everyone else left, I was left there alone. I was 14 because my home life at that time, etcetera. And he was like, where are you going? I'm like, I'm going to take the bus to Lancaster. I know this guy and he was like, no, no. You're coming to our house.
Okay. Okay, so he took me a tone, he's house. And I went into Tony's room that he had grown up in, Tony lived in Fallbrook at that time. And the room wasn't filled with Trophies, the room will was trophies. And I remember just thinking like holy cow like and when I think about that and I think about what a healthy person Tony turned out to because it happened. He blessed to know him a little bit. It's amazing because a lot of people that had those trophies, whatever domain of life.
They converted all that in two ways to just burn the oil down in there candle. He's a guy who still going in his 50s, right? So payment that's a little aside story but I think this notion of energy to me is so important because as you said when we move toward action and we complete something, the oil in that candle starts to get replenished and the flame Burns hotter. I'd like to take a brief break and thank our sponsor inside tracker inside tracker is a personalized nutrition platform. The analyzes data from your blood and
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off what you're talking about. And I'm very interested in this now, and I don't know if there's
Has already been measured or not. But what essentially, we're talking about is confidence level, right? So if I go out and win,
I feel good about it and it let's say I'm doing a jiu-jitsu tournament. And the first match, I go out there and I submit the guy in 30s, taken down submitted in 30 seconds, I'm feeling good, I'm feeling like confident, right? So what does that mean? My dopamine is up because I got that victim or testosterones up because I got that Victory. My confidence is up because I got that Victory, same thing, other direction. If I go out first match, and I lose to somebody, my dopamine goes down. That chemical thing goes down. My confidence goes down.
And what what I have to do is I have to learn how to maintain a level of confidence because if I get overcome, if I win that first match win the second, I'm gonna kill this next guy and I go out and sloppy and I don't care and that's when I get caught, if I get total, if I lack confidence I go out there and there's nothing to mail do to beat this guy that's going to be horrible, of course, I'm gonna get smashed. So it's a similar thing that we're talking and I just wonder how much if you start measuring
Because if they say, hey, if you win, your testosterone goes up, right? And then, if you win more, your testosterone goes up by your dopamine goes up high, your confidence is going up, but you can get to a point where your confidence is too high. And now you're getting sloppy and now you don't care and it would you know you mentioned cocaine you do you see like videos of people that are all coked up and they say hey I can do this they think they can do everything all possible confident right there over. They think they can kick your ass on Alpha, that that's like too much dopamine too much ego too much confidence. The other side of the
Spectrum is someone that's on some kind of Downer drug and they don't feel like they can do anything. They're lethargic their confidence is low and they're just depressed. So there's an interesting tie in between dopamine ego confidence.
And probably testosterone that you get from winning and from losing. And once again, as a leader,
From a leadership perspective, you can't get wrapped up in that you can't. You can't get wrapped up in that you have to detach from it. You have to be able to take a step back and then if you're good, even as a competitor, you'll say, oh yeah, that last match was easy, but I need to prepare for the next match. I can't bring over confidence. Look, I don't want to lock a confidence, it's a balance, right? It's that it's that flame on the oil, burning lamp, that you're talking about that. Do you want that steady flame? You don't want too much going to burn out of control. You don't want to little the flame will go
out yet.
Earlier, we talked about this notion that the some of these older. So Hungarian psychologist had, which is no, she have generators versus projectors and their idea was people sort of divided into these different categories and the world needs both. It's not a one is better than the other, but the world absolutely needs both. And there is this idea, now, based on some neuroscience and some other psychology that I've been leaving into which is that generators know how to tap into
To the system and they love this system. I think back to your story about being taken to shop for pants and it turns out to be a trip to shop for a number of different experiences for you. Write a really telling experience. I having it having an action effect on the world and something coming back to you that still sits with you inside. In fact there's a dopamine circuit they're still related to this, you know, young woman or then when young woman at that time.
Some people are generators and I think that they are more attuned to this dopamine system. And so as we're having this conversation, I'm guessing that about the estimate is that somewhere between 50 and 65 percent of people are going. Yeah, I get it. More workouts is going to give me more energy. I need to do more of that, I need to. When I'm back on my heels, I need to think about the things, I can complete etcetera. And then the other 45% or so, 35% might be saying, I don't really get it. Now, the idea is that the projectors
Can tap into these same circuits. Everyone has these catecholamine circuits dopamine etcetera, but that they tend to be more of observers in the world and they like being partnered with and symbiotic with these people. Now, this starts to take on kind of like a stereotypical masculine feminine things, but this exists on both sides it really does. There might be some biases right by biological sex. There may not be right. We could argue that. It's probably an argument. They'll get us into more trouble than into answers, it doesn't really matter. The point is that some people are perfectly happy to be in the
Of people winning because they feel good to see other people winning. They like to be a support staff. That's what makes them feel good. Other people would rather stick hot Forks in their eyes then not be the person engaged in the activity. Maybe not every activity, but the activity. So, we're talking about the generators and the projectors.
I think that in the context of moderating, these systems, it's Sookie. I mean, it's key to have a long Arc in a career path, military science or otherwise, I think it's key in every domain of life. And I think, for me, one thing that I've learned both the hard way, and I've also benefit from the positive experience of, I think in relationships, it could be romantic relationships, but also friendships, and in family there because there are generators and project.
There's almost always in those kind of symbiotic relationship, you know, romantic couple or a family that you know some kids are more generator. Some are more projectors. Just buy buy something, who knows? Maybe it's hardwired. Maybe not.
as the leader of your family, I'm going to assume one of the two leaders, but as a leader in your family, I'm not gonna make any assumptions here as the leader your family and also as a father in particular,
How do you apply these same sorts of ideas? When, you know, your kid is kind of down because it's hard to be a 14 year old, or because it was a bad day or when they're up, right? I think the up states are as interesting as the down States. Like yes, like got the degree. Got the win. How much do you let them celebrate before he like? Hey listen, you know, you just got yourself another couple mL of oil in your candle. You can do with that. You going to burn it where you going to save it for the next thing. So you can climb the
staircase.
Well clearly it's a very similar thing to what I just talked about, you know, if your kid is doing well and and wins the wrestling tournament and is like, yeah, I won the wrestling tournament. And what do they want to do? They want to eat a triple cheese pizza, right? I mean, they want to go crazy and you as a leader and as a and as a parent and as a friend need to say a man, I mean, you did good. That was awesome. You had a great day but let's start thinking a little bit about next week to how about we just have a few slices of pizza, right? As a reward.
And so this is this is the same in any situation that you could be in interacting with other human beings. You want to be the person that kind of modulates the, the confidence and the ego, or the way you put it, you know, the dopamine and and the celebratory activities. So, no matter who you are, and this goes with yourself as well, you know, you do something, you have a success and you say, oh, that, that that's great. But
All glory is fleeting and I need to get back to work and you look and do people go too far with that sometimes? Yes. Absolutely. Sometimes people they don't stop and celebrate it all. And those are the kind of people I think that get burned out eventually because they never say, hey, that was awesome. We had a big wind, cool, high five, they don't even say that. So I think, you know, as a leader as a friend, as a parent as a spouse, you want to be able to modulate that help modulate that. Don't shut it down, you know, your kid.
Walks off the wrestling mat with, for a high five. And you say you could have won by more. No, I'm not talking about that or your kid walks off the mat. After losing you say, you got what you deserve know. You've got to be the counter, the counter weight to the emotions that other people have. And I think that when you're when you're doing a good job as a leader, as a friend, as a spouse, is whatever you're doing a good job as a counterweight. I think that's a good way to look at it. You want to, you want to provide some balance for people to make sure that they don't get out of control and you know
When people have a downfall, it's normally because they've surrounded themselves with people that there's no counter to, there's no counter balance, you know, if you were my best friend and I you know, I went out drinking last night and had a great time and partied all night and met a girl. And you're like, heck, yeah, let's do it again tonight. Eventually where we're going to be? We're going to be in the gutter somewhere but if you say hey dude that was awesome. But do you remember? We got school on Monday, right? And you kind of pull me back. That's we got to find balance in life and ourselves.
And then and then we got as much. We can provide balance for other people because people are emotional and they get caught up in what they're doing and you want to, you want to keep people
balanced. I think one of the reasons people are really drawn to your message and I put myself in that category and I remember 2014 was a very different picture for me, doesn't really matter what the Contour was but was things were working, but they weren't working the way I wanted them to. And I remember arriving at your content first through the Tim Ferriss podcast than chocolate. Then they eventually the Jocko willing podcast Joe
Podcast. Those are the big two ones that got like introduced me to you and your content and it was really a case of at the time, I didn't have a lot of friends that were doing similar things to me or that match my daily routines in a way that, you know, I could kind of synergize with in this way. I think one reason why you are so helpful to people is that not everybody has these friends you know. So you can have the friend that's like let's go out and Tie One On Again. A lot of people don't even have that friend.
And where they have a friend but they're not really close with that person. There's some ideas nowadays about, you know, like eighty percent of males don't have a close friend that they could go. I don't know. I mean, I'm guessing girls and women feel the same to, you know, that a lot of stuff is superficial. And there's a lot of communication but not a lot of connection, right? And so I think that you and a few other people in the, let's call it social media public face public facing space, serve as archetypes of like the friend. That's going to tell you when you're up great.
Let's clamp it after awhile or that when you're down, let's get going. And here's how you get going. And so I do want to highlight that because I think it's really important, it's but one reason why people are drawn to your message and the message of some other people who are out there trying to do similar things, but you in particular, because yes, you have this military background, very intense, military background wartime background but also you bring it into the daily routines that certainly apply to everybody, you know, most everybody can access.
Non-heated, water night. One would hope there's another dimension to this, that I want to just bring up and get your Reflections on as it relates to Military. Work School relationship, family Etc, which is this somewhat counterintuitive idea. But then once you hear it, it makes perfect sense. Which is that even though the catecholamines are responsible for drive, and that, that's what we're really about. When we're forward Center of mass and we have to control the level, the intensity of the candle and the
The oil and I don't know what those actually mapped to exactly. We could probably figure it out, we really parsed it. But that's the the the idea here, the analogy in a kind of surprising way. We know that for sure, one way to restore levels of motivation Drive enthusiasm and to some degree confidence that things could be different is through depressed, things like sleep, right? When things are really really hard when kids are
Just like that, they're like falling apart, you know. It's like you put him to sleep. They wake up and they're like, delightful to like, run around their pajamas when they're little and a teenager wakes up after a good night's sleep, they might be alone likes early, but we're back adults are like this, the world is falling apart. We go to sleep, wake up, okay? I might be able to manage this kind of mindset so sleep and then the other one is we know that play the sort of the kind of physical activity or mental activity, where
Are you might be a little competitive but the stakes are low and it's really more about connection with the activity or connection with somebody else. Like we're going to play a game of whatever you know I won't play chess with Max because of kick. My ass won't do Jus with either of you because you'll beat me up both of you kindly, but you'll do it. But, you know, like we were to play a game, it's just us. Yeah, we might be a little competitive, but the stakes are low, right? We know that play and social connection and sleep.
Are basically the reservoir for the location that you go to refill the oil in the candle every single time. And so for you, where do those things play into your routine? You know, you mentioned, you can go hard all day and then in the evening, is it dinner with family? Typically, if you're at home, and what does that look like? I know we're kind of parsing and I don't want to carve into your personal life too, deeply obviously their boundaries there but was that look like is it everyone at the table phones away and you're talking about the day or is it
You know yeah. Share with us a little bit about what that looks like. Is I think it is an important Contour to what you're about and what we're talking about that. Most people just don't have a window into.
Yeah. So first of all, I mean, just the refilling, the tank with games, I mean that's what Jiu-Jitsu is, right? You're gonna go and you're gonna have social connection with people. You're going to talk to people that, you know, you're going to joke about whatever, then you're going to roll your gonna have a good time rolling, you're gonna get a little sweat on, you're going to feel good, then you're going to high-five, like there's huge.
That that's there and your brain is kind of off, you know, when you're when you're training Jiu-Jitsu at a certain level, you're not going to be thinking anymore. Same thing with surfing you go surfing and you catch a wave. I mean you're not thinking about, oh I need to put my balance over here know, it's happening and you're having a good time. So I would say that.
Restoration for me comes from those two things is for sure. And then, yeah, I mean by my wife and my kids, when I get home, I'm at my kids are older now and they're out of the house, except for one. And when I was in the Navy, when they were young, I wasn't around at all. You know, there wasn't any like, we would rarely have dinner together because I was gone, coming home, late. You're working all the time. You can never get all your work done. I'm trained in Jiu-Jitsu, like it was
We rarely ate dinner as a family when I was in the, in the teams. And now, when when I'm home and we can eat together for sure, you know, my, my daughter that's still at home. She's going to, you know, we set out there and eat dinner and talk about just normal things that people talk about, like, you know, how to conduct a night Ambush or non-skid, let's talk about normal normal, you know, daily things and and what's going on and you know, my
Daughter. That's she's 13 right now. And she she talks to me about all kinds of stuff, you know? And it's awesome. Yeah, I'm definitely enjoying that. Aspect of being around more than I was, when I was in the teams and I just, we didn't have dinner. Didn't happen? So I would take my kids to Jutsu. I taught Jujitsu classes when I could, when I was in the teams, would do, like a workouts with them in the morning.
If I had time on the weekends for sure, stuff like that with my kids, that's kind of what I did.
But now yeah, we my wife is awesome and she is a great cook now because when we first got married it's questionable I just was harassing her about this the other day. Like she she got she's an unbelievable cook now and it's awesome. And when we first met to by her own admission, she will tell you, she was not a girl she's from England, right? And so they're just not cooking what we're liking.
To do over there, at least when I was growing up in the few times I made over there. The food was pretty Dreadful. I mean, that there were some exceptions to that, but, and they drank a lot over there. So, yeah, I've been to some scientific meetings over there where they would start with, like, Sherry in the afternoon and then beer after work. It was outrageous. I mean the amount of alcohol
intake was just absurd. Yeah,
sorry, Brits my I'm and again, I'm not trying to. I didn't episode an alcohol. A lot of people were angry but it was so cuz its base he said once you get past two drinks a week, you're starting to head into territory. That's
Can deplete your health. So you got to do a lot of other things to offset, but they drink a lot.
Yeah, the Brits drink a lot. I have spent time over there with my father-in-law, my brother-in-law and and we definitely drank a lot. So I'm glad I don't live there and had to drink without. I'm glad I don't have to drink with them all the time. I'd probably be dead you were
straight edge grown up,
right? Yeah, I mean when I was it when I was a kid and then when I joined the Navy I started drinking. That's like part.
The culture that I bought into and you don't like I wanted to be a good seal and I'm looking around at the guys that were considered good seals. Oh so we're drinking. Okay, that's what. We'll, that's what we're doing and that's what I did.
Did you tell you? I think my my you know looking back now. I didn't really I didn't think of it as a big deal at the time I wasn't like, well first of all even when I was growing up and I was didn't drink and didn't smoke, didn't do drugs, I wasn't like a guy, putting an x on my hand although my friends and I we we all didn't drink didn't smoke so we definitely look. I was listening to minor that when I was a kid I was II. Get it. But I wasn't a guy running around telling everyone I was
Straight edge, you know? But I was on that path for sure. And then when I got in the SEAL Teams like, okay this is this is a different culture. I'm not used to it and I didn't really even and really even understand what drinking was. I mean I'd never I never had been drunk So Gone, the SEAL Teams I was like okay well you know once I turn 21 okay this is hey these guys we're going to have fun and I kind of just okay that's what we're doing and then I drank a ton while I was in the SEAL Teams and then as
Bend those, I retired from the SEAL Teams and went out. We basically went to every bar that we would normally go to like it as seals. I think we closed out the night at the pack Shores in OB and went home that morning. I woke up the next morning worked out and then I just kind of stopped drinking because and now I just definitely I mean now I just don't really drink anymore. So,
That's that.
Yeah, when I have my lab in San Diego for five years, that's where my lap started. I definitely saw a team guys in bars. You guys would come in, come in and take over. These were literal takeovers. Yeah. You basically I wouldn't leave because I wouldn't like give them the satisfaction or me the dissatisfaction but it was a little frustrating, you know, you're in there, you're having decent time and then just it's an enormous pack of Team guys, comes in and sort of like I maybe it's time to close out the night you know sometimes as friends with enough of them that you know but your
Not really a part of, you're not really a part of it. I always knew that and understood that one thing that I think really comes through now, especially, but throughout our discussion, and all the things I've seen of you and it gets me back to this thing that came up with the beginning. I'd really like to return to is that you seem to have a very strong sense of context and self. I just said, I'm not a psychologist. I'm not here to play one but you know what you just described was that, okay? In one context, you know?
So it made sense to be straight edge, you mentioned Minor Threat, great band straight edge band, but when it came time to do, you run around with your friends then and it made sense to be, you know, without alcohol or drugs or anything at that stage and then you get into another context. It's like, okay, I can do this, I can drink and still perform well and do all the things I need to do. And then when that closes out, I'm going to, I'm going to do something else and some people are like that because they're kind of a chameleon, right day. They're switching themselves, depending on the context and they're kind of getting access
So when they're in one location or another, but that's not you at all. I can tell with with certainty that's not you at all. That there seems to be a very strong sense of self so that when we have a sense of self that's firm we can go into different contexts. We can even change our Behavior but we don't lose who we are, which means we can always return to it. That the image in my mind is like I've done a little bit of scuba diving, not a lot, but there during some of the more advanced training for us are this wasn't Seal training of course was you know, following along
Line in the dark like a night dive and you're following a line and you know, sometimes you're navigating with tools but something you're following a line under water. And this idea that like, you can let go of that line. But you have you remember where it is? You can return to it. And that's kind of how I imagine the sense of self because in different contexts. Most healthy people modify themselves a little bit. We act differently at a wedding or a funeral than we do in class or without, you know, with our friends. Of course, it's important part of being a human, functional human. So it seems to me that from a pretty early stage. You had a pretty good sense of self.
Now, I don't know if you sit in your room and meditate on like who is Jocko willing can like touch that Dad that Central Court of self? I'm guessing you don't but as I say this, I have to ask. Was there something in your upbringing, your parents or some? Or was it just kind of how you always imagine yourself as like? Yeah, this is who I am, like, no matter what happens around me, like, I kind of know who I am. Even if I'm engaging in some of the behaviors that I might not doing another constantly, I know who I am because I actually think that many people do not.
Have a very firm sense of self or their sense of self is so rigid that they can only operate in this, like, narrow trench of one domain of life, and they end up very, very isolated. I'd love for you to kind of share with us. What your Recollections are. Kind of like the first time you realized like yeah, like I'm good in a bunch of different places. I'm safe for um, whatever because I think is this also relates to
confidence.
You know, I'm glad you are giving me the benefit of the doubt on going in the teams. And and being like, Oh, hey, man, it looks like guys are drinking and I haven't really drank before. And seems like these guys are having a good time. Let's go have a good time with these guys. And that's kind of what I did, right as far as. And, you know, I look at it now and unfortunately, for me, you know, I look at alcohol now as just I've seen, so I've seen it destroy so many people.
That I've now kind of look at it and go man I don't I don't think people should drink and look, I get it. I'm kind of an example. Like I used to drink and go out and have a good time. It wasn't that big of a deal to negatively impact me in some dramatic way. But I have so many friends that it is horrible for it is all but ruined their lives and you know, it's totally legal which is kind of bizarre. So I think
That figuring that out. When I look back in and the culture and the SEAL Teams was very
There was very alcohol Centric and part of that is because you know you got like it's just like a fraternity is alcohol Centric or a or a a football team is out because you got a bunch of young dudes that are going to drink and have a good time. So it just sort of a young, dude, kind of thing. And unfortunately it ends up ruining a lot of people's lives and they make bad decisions and they do stupid things and it's just not good. And I think the culture is moving away from that, a little
In the SEAL Teams, you know, my alcohol brief used to say and IC. Tell my guys, if you go out, you get a DUI, you get put in jail for a fight, you get hurt because you're doing something drunk. You just did Al qaeda's job for them. You just did Al Qaeda, they want to take you off the battlefield and you just took yourself off the battlefield. You can't go on deployment now. And that would always hit guys. And I think that that's
You know, the SEAL Teams kind of leaning in that direction more realizing the - negativity of alcohol. I wish I would have realized that earlier. I wish I would have been a better leader and recognize that an earlier stage and recognize that just because I was kind of getting away with it. Meaning it didn't really, I didn't, I didn't wake up in the morning. Go man, I can't wait to get your. I never, I never really had that feeling.
I wish I would have realized that there's other guys that do and you know, there's people that can operate and be functional and it doesn't really impact our lives. But there's a lot of people that don't and I don't think it's worth the dice roll to start drinking. I just don't think it's worth the dust or what do you get out of it? So I think that overall, that's why, if, when I think about alcohol I just think about all the, all the, all the lives that it's ruined and I don't like it. And I wish I would have done a better job of saying, you know what?
This probably not good and we shouldn't do this and unfortunately, I didn't and I try and convey that message as much as I can now. And it did bring me back to my roots because when I was a kid it was like, alcohol is weak. And he look at these guys, they don't know what they're doing. They're acting like idiots, I'm not going to be like that. And so you know as I got older once I got all the SEAL Teams, I kind of went back to that. As far as kind of where I became me,
I just actually have to kind of give a lot of credit to the music that I grew up listening to and the attitude that we had back then listening to hardcore music being able to stand up against what other people were saying, which is what you're doing when you're in that scene and the whole DIY nature of it. Hey, we we can just do this ourselves, we can just make this happen for ourselves, we don't need any, we don't need anybody else, we can do this.
And that hardcore attitude and sticking by your friends and standing up and getting in fights. And like that's what you're going to do. That's kind of my attitude and I got interviewed for a documentary that they're making about Harley Flanagan and and the kromaggs and you know when when I was a kid,
And actually through my whole life, like that was the that music is the soundtrack to my life. And so I always would have that music running in my head, but to your question, I had something in me, that when I heard that music for the first time, I was like, okay, then here it is. You know, here it is. This is, you know, I hear the Beatles, I hear the Grateful Dead, I hear The Rolling Stones, I hear the whoever, and you go, okay, that's fine. But when I heard hardcore music for the first time,
When I heard the kromaggs, right? Heard Agnostic Front. When I heard the Bad Brains, I thought it was that was just like it was part of me already and then it was the attitude. And and again you can listen to my podcast with Harley Flanagan. The way I viewed, Harley Flanagan the way I viewed, the kromaggs was not the way they actually were. I mean, you know, Harley was doing drugs. I mean, horrible drugs. He was on heroin everything else but his image was
Was like straight edge, kind of spiritual, they had all that stuff going on and I thought okay well that's who they are but I didn't know. I'm like a kid living in the woods and Connecticut. I'm just gonna be hearing what I'm hearing, he listened to the lyrics, Listen to the lyrics of Minor Threat, listen to lyrics. And and you go, okay, this stuff I agree with this stuff and I just think that, that kind of
Kind of set, my kind of set a datum in my head of being, okay, with being outside being okay with saying no being okay, with being a rebel being okay with not going along with what everyone else is doing. And that came that became very important. When I was in the military and I looked at what leadership might be telling me to do and might think myself, hey, that doesn't seem like a good idea and having the the wherewithal to say, hey boss, I know,
Not sure. This is a good idea. Not to be a jerk about it but to say there might be a better way to get this done. What do you think of this or hey, boss? Can I ask you a question about that? So I think if I had to trace it back, you know, having Black Flag, my War side, two on my record player for like a year and a half straight. That's going to leave a mark, man and I think it left a mark on
me.
I love what you just said and when I say love, I really mean it. Because as we both know, we share a common love for certain music in particular Minor Threat and some stuff from the punk rock scene in particular, for me, the Northeast punk rock scene, the bruisers. Yeah, I'll borrow from the bruisers now, people know him as the lead singer for the Dropkick Murphys. Before, that was the bruised and we we run the risk of going deep down a rabbit hole of music that most people may or may not be familiar with, although most people have heard of the dropkicks, but yeah, I'm right there with you. I mean, I remember the first time hearing stiff little fingers or
Rancid and even Bouncing Souls right for New Jersey not even bouncing. So sorry, sorry. Sorry Brian and Greg like no, The Bouncing Souls and going. Yes, that that's me. That's it. Like, but as you said it was already kind of in you. It's like a recognition and I bring this up and I want to highlight it, not because we share this, although I do find that to be an amazing kinship that we felt right away and was like, we probably riff for 25 hours just on that, but it brings him back to this idea. That certainly is not.
Not my idea, actually, the first time I heard about it was from Robert Greene, who wrote the book Mastery. And some important writings, you know, various what was it? I think it was the forget how many Laws of Power but those books. Yep, robbery Master. He's actually a book that I highly recommend people read because it talks about mentorship and finding mentors and the fact that we're supposed to break up and move on from mentors and that mentors aren't always people that we know or that know us etcetera amazing book really but he was the first person I ever heard described this idea that if we think about
Back long enough, there's some seed moment it was shopping for the pants. It sounds like it was but also music where you see something and it's like yes that's me and I'm that and then that becomes a sort of soundtrack or visual image or something for your life that you carry forward with you.
The neuroscientist in me wants to say that that is the first time that we really tap into this dopamine system in a way that is unique to us because every child responds to food with a little bit of dopamine when we're hungry response to warmth when we're cold response to a warm dry diaper after we just wet ourselves which we all did, you know? Don't know. Maybe Jocko. You change your own diapers but I'm guessing. It's someone change your diaper at one point.
Not an image path. We need to go down but the idea is that we all have these Universal sources of kind of having our needs met going from discomfort to comfort and back again, which is basically childhood. But at some point something comes along that we really feel is unique to us and it may be the thing that everyone else likes, maybe it's top 40 or whatever it is. Maybe it's the shoe that everyone's wearing it, that seems good but I do think that there are certain people who are kind of 10 or 20 or maybe even 180 degrees off from what everyone else likes. And they're like,
That thing is, what's really cool and it's a felt thing and so along the lines of felt things as opposed to things that everyone values. What are your sources of motivation? And I'm going to guess that some of them are
Internal we could Point ahead or we could point to heart doesn't really matter. But like when you think of sources of motivation, do you have a pallet of them that you can dip into? Do you even feel the need to dip into them? Or is it really just all about action steps throughout your day or if I can even Venture until the somewhat you know, harder stories that I've heard you talk about, you sometimes, think backing with listen I'm going to do this because you're a bunch of guys that are dead now that can't. And so I'm going to do it because
I can. What are your what are the paints on your motivation palette if you will?
Well, you probably you probably heard me. Say that motivation isn't something that I am going to count on because it's just an emotion that's going to come and go and it's just like feeling happy. You feel happy right now. Maybe you won't feel happy in 15 minutes. You feel sad now, maybe you won't feel sad in 15 minutes. You feel motivated? Right now, you might not feel motivating 15 minutes therefore I can't rely on it so I'm not going to put any, I'm not going to put any money on.
Just being motivated because it doesn't really matter to me. So
the
daily actions that I take aren't from motivation, there they're just from disciplined. Like, like I said, earlier, I'm not going to get up and go through some big debate about. Well, relation do I really feel like doing this? No, I don't feel like doing this is, but doesn't matter. So I'm just gonna go do it.
now, if we start to look at sort of a broader,
movement through life and continuing to try and move forward and move on, you know,
my buddy, Seth died. And he was the Delta platoon commander in task unit Bruiser and he he died in 2017 and it was in a parachute accident.
and,
It was it was I mean it's definitely unexpected and and also he'd already been through multiple deployments was with with us with me in the Battle of ramadi. He then went back into sadr City and led baton of very dangerous operations and then he did a other deployments and was kind of done with his deployments kind of done and now he's just
Talking about when he's going to retire. And he's a couple years away from retirement. And, you know, I'm talking about, hey, we're going to work together again. And it all seems like we're on a pretty good path to just move forward, and then he ends up dying in a parachute accident. And he's a guy that, you know, was really just kind of, you're not going to be able to replace any
Any, you keep can't. There's a uniqueness to him that is you're not going to find and you know I've got some stuff that he wrote he was an incredible writer and I'll like try and write something like him. I can't we can't do it because he had a bigger vocabulary and more articulate way of writing and so I can't write anything as well as he wrote. He was incredible at guitar, he played guitar played ukulele like sick like an
Bubble at playing guitar and he's a total knuckle-dragger like a total Meathead knuckle-dragger. You know, his nickname was unfrozen caveman because he just he just you know look like a big cave man.
And yet he
spoke French and you know could recite French poetry and was really good at learning languages and he was an artist and he had his you know what's in synesthesia is you know what that is?
Merging of the census of people. They can see colors and so he
didn't know what it was.
Sorry, I see colors. I hope most people can see colors. I sorry that can hear colors. And and can associate particular colors with sound like two particular keys on the piano. It's pretty rare. Some people think they have it, but true synesthesia. X are pretty rare but they don't have to fight for this trait. It just kind of emerges for them, he didn't know it,
but one day, he was talking me and he was embarrassed to tell me.
He's like, you know, what's weird? Is you and I when I think of numbers, I have colors in my head and and I go. What do you mean? He says Halo was 0 and I remember seven is yellow. I don't remember any of the oh, but he just rattled off like one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. You know, he says, you know, Halo white clear all of you know just rattled off these colors. So he had this this he had that synesthesia and it gave him some kind of weird ability to memorize numbers. So you know he'd be in a
Our and talk to some girl and he say what's your number? And he would just need to know it for two years, he would just know it. And that also made him incredibly good at playing guitar because now like the scale and the fretboard of a guitar is this, it's a mathematical thing that he has all in this weird this weird coloration scenario going on. So there's this. So he's this guy and you know and very a very emotional guy, very emotional guy who would
Would, you know, I, you know, I was talking earlier about being a balance for someone. I had to balance this dude out on a daily basis. Sometimes, you know, he'd be so mad about something. You don't want one day because I hate the team's. I hate all these guys and I'd say, yeah, I don't get it man. And the next day of on never, getting out of the team's, you know, he would, he would oscillate that bad. And I would tell him, hey, you're hey, bro, your oscillating again and just would do anything and he and he
Loved his guys and would do anything for his guys.
and um,
so when he died,
You know, where we're at. As we're at is, it's not as funeral, it's before the funeral, it's like the the open-casket thing the Wake thing and
Myself.
His brother Alex laughs Babin who I wrote extreme ownership with and JP to know who's one of my brothers who works with us at a salon front. Now is with us in ramadi and was very close to Seth and we're like everyone kind of cleared out for us and
We go in there and I think JP gave him JP had one of those Memorial bracelets with guys names on it that had died in j.p. gave that to him. And I think late gave him some surf wax because also Seth was a, was a surfer. And, and I gave Seth his black belt because he started training Jiu-Jitsu with me. And he had, he had his purple belt, he'd gotten his Purple belt a game, his black belt, and
And everyone was just quiet and, you know, j.p. was telling the story the other day.
And I just said, we will not fail him.
Meaning that?
Him.
Mark Mikey, Chris Seth and countless other guys.
Date that they're not here, they don't have the opportunity to do the things we do. They don't have they don't have the opportunity to get up in the morning. So
That's what it is, man.
I won't fail those guys.
Thanks for sharing that.
Yeah, thank God.
Anyone listening to this feels what I feel right now, which is
it's very clear that the
the depth of emotion for people that we care about and lose is has everything to do with our love for them. There's just no question about it, right? The grief and love are so in.
intimately, tied, they've, they are direct reflection of one another and I, you know, I
Hesitate to kind of stay on hard themes but I think it's really important for a couple of reasons. Last time we spoke it was in your office and your podcast. And after we wrapped up, we started talking about some people, we know and some things that had happened in your community and kind of spooled into some discussions, about things that happened, in nearby communities, and civilian culture, and you know,
One of the things that so perplexing. I think two
people,
Including me, but maybe with time less. So, and it at this actually came up last night and discussion at home because of some recent events, not close to me, but she is that, you know, some people go through things where there's loss. They go through life and there's hardship, most people experience, some hardships, certainly some more than others and every once in a while.
And far too often and even in the Seal team community. And even in the various communities within the Seal team Community where one would never expect it. All right, these are highly trained tight community.
Hard guys, right? That's the language. So we sometimes hear, but as you pointed out that these are people often, they have tremendous emotional depth. I am so glad that you brought that up because I think we,
You know, I sometimes think of his motion as weakness. But you know, there was a time, not long ago, 40 50 years ago where emotions like jealousy and intensity, think the character sunny and The Godfather, like, he would get so pissed. You do, why you don't best, right? That's pretty emotional response. Where intensity and emotion were kind of interchangeable words, right? At some level.
I'm going to be direct. There have been a lot of guys come out of the SEAL Teams. I've been surprised to hear the kill themselves and yesterday there was a major suicide. I didn't know this guy in prison. We actually followed each other on social me but admittedly was not close to him. Didn't know. Him didn't know him at all. In fact, his name was twitch or something and he's this guy was a, it was a public-facing figure but listen happens all too often and it even happens in former operators.
And suicide. Something that fascinates me and intrigues me and scares the hell out of me. Because for the life of me, I cannot map it to any specific thing in the brain or body that we're aware of. And yeah, my I've had several friends, commit suicide had my undergrad advisor, commit suicide, the point is not them where their story. The point is,
What in the world dictates whether or not somebody who has a community?
Who's doing well and then less well.
Decides to off themselves to end their own life versus, you know, decide, I'm going to keep going. I mean, this is I'm raising. This is a question. I wish I had an answer. I used to have ideas like, oh, it's time perception. You know why these people are so miserable feeling, so miserable that they feel it's going to go on forever. But then you start reading the literature on suicide and I've started to go into this it for those of you that can stomach it. And I don't know that I want to recommend this movie, but I'm just going to say it exists the movie The Bridge where they fix the camera on the Golden Gate bridge for a year. It turns out, one person a day on average tries to jump off.
Talked to a guy who survived it by the way, he jumped off, the moment he went off there, he thought I wish I hadn't done that, he survived his kid with bipolar, bipolar disorder, especially males 20 to 30 times higher incidents of suicide. Massive increase the point is that
There's something that happens in the brain where somehow, people also will get the idea. And you hear this, that this is like something they're excited to do, or that they're going to write the world somehow by doing this or that, somehow, it's like a gift to themselves again. I'm not encouraging. Anybody do this, I want to be very clear but these are the things that you hear and sadly your community has lost a number of people through suicide. And yet there are a lot of guys that thrive.
And so more as a template for trying to understand mental health and depression and suicide, what are your thoughts on? Why some people seem to thrive?
And some people just go all the way down.
Clearly there's a, that's a very complex question and there's probably a lot of different answers and I certainly am not one to be able to answer that question. However,
Probably where my, where my thought has gone on this lately? Because, you know, I've known some guys that have killed themselves and I've been totally shocked
But and just been taught completely and totally shocked that guys, that I knew killed themselves guys, that you would think all this guy would would never do this in a million years and that's the feeling I've had a lot about. A lot of the guys that I know that have killed themselves,
I had a woman on my podcast name, Sarah Wilkinson, and she's an awesome woman, and she was married to a seal. His name was Chad. I didn't know him.
He killed himself.
he and to hear her describe the story, The the shocking thing about the story is that the guy that she knew the guy that she married
was not the same guy that killed himself.
Something happened to him.
That made him a different person.
And look, they're getting all this information now about CTE and the, the brain trauma that you go through and people are exposed to that. And I think, you know, if you've ever seen George Foreman, he seems totally normal and good to go, right? And Muhammad Ali, not so much. And I've known Fighters and you can look at any number of boxers that have had a career and some of them
Them are fine. And some of them have some real significant. What is it? Pugilistic, there's pugilistic syndrome, right? They've been punched too much and they have problems. So different people. You can expose different people to blast blast impact, and it's going to have a different impact over time. And I think that, you know, again to hear Sarah explain, that story.
And what she saw from her husband, and how different he was, when they got married, compared to where they ended up. It's totally different. It totally different person.
I had another friend of mine on who named Marcus Capone and his wife came on with him and she said the same thing, like the guy that she married was not the same guy, that was ready to kill himself in and he didn't thankfully, if it was a different person and it's not look, you know, if you know, Fred is married to some woman and Fred and Jessica grow apart over time and
He ends up with some other girl. He's still the same guy, right? It's still the same guy that is now like they grew apart. They're getting divorced, we get it. But the way that both of them describe their husbands as being different people,
That's what stuck with me more than anything else. So, I, you know, again, I'm throwing this out there only because it's what I've observed through. The people that I know, and, and seeing and hearing those stories of people being totally different, and I've known a few people. One of my friends, Dave killed himself. I never, I never would have guessed in a million years that Dave would kill himself.
He just did. It doesn't compute, it doesn't compute. And so my suspicion is, there has to be something going on mechanically or chemically with the brain that causes them to get into a mode where they're depressed and they don't see a way out and that that's the way they feel now. And again, what's interesting about this is, we already talked about the fact that the selection, the selection process weeds,
Doubt guys that are going to take a loss and not be able to get get up again. Know you've got seals, seals can take a loss and get back up again. That's what you learn, how to do in bit, or that's what you you don't learn how to do it. You you have it and if you make it through that training, you have that ability to take a loss. Alright cool Shake It Off, get back up, keep going they're going to do that to you. So now you've got guys that are taking a loss and they don't see a way out anymore in fact to such a point that they're going to take their own lives.
It's my suspicion is at some point, they're going to figure out that that this exposure to, you know, to the adrenaline, the explosive explosions all the time. I mean, you go out to a range just distinct in peacetime. You got to arrange and you shoot a Carl Gustav.
And your range safety officer. So you go out there with every guy that shooting a Carl, Gustav to big giant like bazooka looking weapon and every time you shoot it kind of rattled your cage a little bit. Well, if you're in a Range safety officer and you're out there and you're going to watch everyone in the platoon shoot three of those. It's going to have an impact. When you go overseas and your breacher or you're part of a breach team, I mean, out of time, where one of my guys, we're doing an assault on a compound, I'm on the ladder.
Like most buildings in Iraq, have a wall around them. So the way we would conduct these rates put the ladder up. You, the assault the breach team would climb over the ladder and I would go right behind the breach team and I would stand on the ladder. So I'm looking at the building observing making sure there's no one waking up, make sure there's no threats. And then, as I'm watching this guy in particular, he puts the breach on the door, explosive breaching, he's gonna blow the door up, he's got his little team with him, he puts the breach on the door, he starts to back away and there's like an obstacle. There was like a freaking
Able or a lawn chair or something and he couldn't get around it, and I'm sitting, it's dark. I mean, it's the middle of the night 2:00 in the morning. And I'm like, I wonder who's going to do? I seem kind of stuck for a second and I just seemed lay down and I'm like, oh, he's going to take this thing and sure enough, you know, three or four feet away from this breach point. He lays down and just clocks off this explosive charge and I jump over the wall. And as I'm going in, I'm trying to, you know, get the rest of the platoon to go and commence assault. I look at him. He's
He look like he just got, you know, hitting head with a baseball bat.
And guess what he did. The next night, another breach on another Target, guess we did. The next night another breach on another Target. So you get guys that have that exposure, which is, I mean, every seal is eating a breach. I mean, you're eating flashbangs. You're eating breeches, you're shooting 50 Cals like you're, you're eating some, some traumatic brain injury, but then you, you must have some people that have some sort of genetic propensity to have this negative thing.
Open and and I can only guess man that this has something to do with it because otherwise, you know, we wouldn't be here in so many of these stories. And of course, we're just talking about the SEAL Teams. We're not talking about the military writ large, which is in the same exact boat. I'm also nervous.
About the social contagion of suicide within the veteran Community. I'm nervous about that. It's one of the things that makes me apprehensive about talking about it, but I obviously, I've talked about, I've had people on my podcast to discuss these things. But II am worried about that, social contagion of, man, you know, Fred did it, you know, he got all this attention and he doesn't have to deal with anything anymore. I'm going to do it, too. There's got to be some level of that going on.
On as well. So it's a horrible situation.
Yeah, the social contagion part is one that hits home from a different dimension. The high school, I went to which is name is an important by gun High School. Gu n, n Gan, High School is
Famous for being one of the better public high schools, not that I attended, as much as I should have to tell you more about the curbs in the parking lot that I could tell you about the classes. I took. And that's just not encouraging people to not attend high school. Please do it took a lot of really hard work to climb back up to where I should have been when I graduate but it has an Infamous reputation reputation. Ours is a reputation as an Infamous school because it's one of the highest suicide rates and I any of the schools in the country because there's a train tracks that run through town and they there was a kind of a contagion of kids throwing themselves on the train tracks. This was
Name. A lot is written up in various newspapers, Etc. Fortunately, it seems to have died down again. I'm also hesitant to, like, talk about this because no one wants to spark this, but there does seem to be something about lack of ability to see into a future, obviously, or the future that people are seeing into is so dark that somehow they lose touch with the idea that emotions come and go. You said it about emotion about motivation, emotions, come and go, but somehow people lose touch with that and then I will venture a guess and
Here, I'm hoping someone's gonna figure this out at some point. So we can have a more concrete conversation about the mechanisms and what to do about it. But I think there's also something about identity about loss of a place to put one's energy, you know, something, useful in the world, you know, to, if you're a general, what you're talking about here are guys that are generators, right? They are not projectors, their generators. They, they live to have effective action on the world for good and then end up killing themselves in youth.
It's a little more complicated to put a finger on, you know, because what's going on, there we assume depression but then in learning more about suicide. There's also this kind of like excitement of for certain people about solving something that seemed unsolvable any other way. And again, I'm not certainly not encouraging this. I strongly discourage young people from taking their own life, obviously, but something about time and the loss of perception about time. And one thing that we know for sure, here we can really hang our hat on something. Is that if you
You do the forensics on somebody that was suicidal attempted or took their life.
In the preceding days and weeks their sleep-wake schedule was completely whacked. They exit the normal routine of most people they isolate through inversions of time and I do wonder sometimes whether or not the vampire shifts, as they're sometimes called a nighttime deployment and the back and forth and that's a lot for a system to take shift workers, killed themselves far more than on shift workers. So I do think there's something there. And again, I'm not saying everyone needs to be in bed by nine and up by
Warren, you know, although that would be a great schedule for most people, but I do think that there are some universal laws of what makes the human body and brain healthy. And if you violate those laws long enough with CTE, or with disruption in your schedules, you run the risk, especially if there's a predisposition there and then other factors start to layer in. Again II. And I have to apologize because I don't have any real answers or more biology or psychology to firmly throughout this except that the warning for people who are buying
Bipolar and know somebody with bipolar. They are 20 to 30 times more likely to kill themselves and males in particular, more likely to use methods that will kill them. The first time as opposed to survive. There's a big sex difference
there. Yeah, the Heathrow alcohol in there too. You know, and and Marcus is running organization now where they're taking their taken vets down to do the Psychedelic. They call a
journey here at this is Veterans Solutions. Yeah yeah they're a great organization. Yep. And I should
Mention very bipartisan organization. I went attended one event on Coronado, and they were people from the far left the far-right politicians and everything in between talking about how critical this is. So, this is not a political issue. This is a, is a mental health
issue. Yeah. And even when I reflected on Marcus talking to me, he was talking about how he's kind of in this downward spiral part of the downward spiral, he's drinking every day and I'm thinking to myself,
Man, like I didn't think of it during the show. I kind of was thinking about it afterwards. I was thinking, man, like your drink if you're drinking all the time, you're on a downward spiral. Like that's one thing you should just
Stop. Let's stop that immediately. So, I just wanted to throw that out there. I think when that's another sign from the outside looking in, if someone's self-medicating with alcohol, it's not a good place, not a good place, they're not in a good place and they brought, they could probably use some
help. I appreciate you saying it again. We did this episode on alcohol. I went into it. Totally open minded. I've never been a big drinker. I've had it. I can drink or not. Drink was never really into drugs at all you. No doubt a little bit. When
I was younger, I regret it. Frankly, brain is plastic early on, I didn't need that. Never did hard drugs, never touch cocaine amphetamine or anything like that. So and if I had, I would say right comfortable enough in my position life that if I had, I'd certainly say but
I think that it's pretty clear that alcohol is bad for us is certainly past a certain you know, to drink weak limit, people especially with it propensity for alcoholism or who are dealing with other issues. That's especially the case for not drinking, right? And I guess, you know, we got into some hard territory here, but I think if this conversation
Q's up and awareness to anybody, which I hope it would. Either people that are in that space of wondering, if they should continue or not or that know somebody who might be. I do think that
the takeaway is very clear, which is that, you know,
There are ways to avoid these traps and to avoid making these traps worse. And I think we regular sleep-wake schedules, understanding that and I wrote this down that, you know, you've particular have said several times a day, rather than looking for sources of things outside you like a job, or a relationship or which are all great but as sources of energy or motivation or inspiration to use action as a positive action as a source of energy, I think is it just a if I were to if I could like put that up on a billboard in Times Square I
I would write and I put your name next to it, which is that action is a positive action is a source of energy that then you can recycle into more things, I think. Yeah. Going back to the fundamentals, right?
Yeah. And and positive action is when you have to contend with something. When there's something that you're afraid of right, step into it, move towards it, that that's how you're going to solve that problem. You don't, you don't solve problems by running away from them. You solve them by moving towards them and figuring out what's going on. And and I mean, alcohol is obviously,
Clear way to avoid the problem, at least for the next four hours and you wake up and that problem is still there. And that's not, that's not good. But, you know, when you've got to some kind of a problem and listen, then we could get go down the whole path of talking about the indirect approach, which is a theory of combat which I completely believe in, but it also applies to, you know, interacting with other people if you have a problem with some other person to think most of what I got, I got a problem with Andrew, I'm going to go confront him on it.
And that might not be this best solution. In fact, it's probably not the best solution for me to go, confront you with the problem because now we're going to have a confrontation, it might be better for me to take an indirect approach and not confront you. But instead engage in a conversation with you about something that's maybe adjacent to the problem that I have and then eventually that builds our relationship to a point where you start to recognize. Oh I bet Jocko feels something about this thing and we can move towards a solution instead of me trying to punch you in the face with some
Truth that I believe versus the truth that you believe and now, we're engaged in combat and that's bad. There's going to be casualties. I'd rather take an indirect approach and build a relationship where we can solve problems in a more positive
way.
I
love that and I love it because it really speaks to the power of thinking carefully, and being patient and a little bit slower at times. I also heard you say something earlier that still flagging in my mind, which is, you know, not thinking too much, think seems to be a time where thinking too much is very dangerous. And again, we can keep the discussion that we were having about mental health, or could even just call what is mental illness? I think everyone would agree. Suicide is some
some reflection of an unhealthy state.
We can keep that in the back drop, as we talked about this, but this isn't necessarily only about that.
You seem to have an ability to engage in things without thinking, too much. And yet also to sit back and be pretty observant, and you've talked about third person in of the self. I'd love to talk a little bit more about this, even though it's a topic you've delved into before. And in particular, the topic of meditation, I've been reading more about meditation, I've meditated for different stretches. My life, different amounts of time and there are two basic forms of meditation that I only recently learned about
One is a focused attention meditation. You sitting closing your eyes focusing on your breath body body surface, or even a visual Target in your environment and just focus. And we know that that enhances one's ability to focus. If you do too late in the day, it also enhance your ability to not fall asleep, right. A lot of people don't realize the meditation too late in the day. If it's a focused meditation, you're just ramping up the activity in the prefrontal cortex, it's a great tool for getting better at focusing but then there's also this type of meditation.
I called open Observer meditation where you purposefully, don't include a Target in your mind or in your vision, or in your hearing, and you just sit there, eyes closed, your eyes open, and you go into a place of whatever comes up, but you don't hover there too long. The goal is to not hover on any one thing, which sounds like deliberate attention deficit disorder, but it's actually a pretty cool method. It turns out for restoring our ability to engage in
In Focus. But also for one particular thing that you mentioned earlier which is creativity and creative problem-solving, which of course requires accessing. Let's just say more colors on the palette than your vision might be on realizing. Oh, there's also all these other colors over here in the periphery that I'm missing because I'm hyper Focus.
Do you meditate? If you do meditate, is it more of an open monitoring or a focus meditation? And if you don't do a kind of standard meditation, are there times throughout your day and your routine and your week, where, as I'm describing this, it maps to something that kind of feels like open monitoring or Focus
meditation. Yes. Oh no, I don't meditate, I haven't ever I don't think I've ever actually meditated for one second of my life and I and I refuse to. It's not that at all. I know Sam.
I'm Harris sent me his app and he and we were going to do a podcast. I said, dude, I'll do it for two weeks and we'll do a podcast and, and I'll be more enlightened and everything and I didn't even give Sam Harris. Two weeks, you know? So I still owe Sam Harris, two weeks on his app of meditation so we can see how it impacts me. But no, I've never done it before. I've never tried to do it. In that being said, if the goal is to take a step back and detach from what's going on, I do that all day every day. So the lat.
That is something that I've talked about in something I tried to teach, you know, I tried to teach the young seal leaders not to get caught up in what's happening right in front of them. But to take a step back detach from the situation detach from their emotions. See more of what's Happening? You know you're talking about seeing more colors of the palette well on the battlefield I want people to be able to see more angles, more Maneuvers more opportunities. More of what the enemy might do more perspective, that's what that's what.
I always tried to achieve and so I'm sorry, I apologize. I can't give you any good discussion on meditation because I haven't, haven't tried
it. No apology necessary but I will ask when you go surfing and you're sitting in the water waiting for a wave. Are you focused on one particular location on the horizon? Or you kind of in kind of a open monitoring? Just enjoying just bouncing up and down in the water. Like, where is your attention during activities like that?
Yeah. So surfing often times.
Bring you your monkey mind and you're just not thinking about anything. Same thing with jiu-jitsu also with surfing, you know, if you're waiting for a wave, your mind is just going, I mean, it's in Another Universe. Sometimes, as you're sitting there waiting because you're just looking out at the Horizon and your your mind, maybe my mind. I'm thinking about all kinds, like, I have to come, I have to come home, sometimes. I'm like, write notes because I thought of this, I thought of an idea. I thought of a perspective that happens to me at Jujitsu, that happens to me talking to people where someone's talking about something,
I'm like, I got a good idea right now to go write that down. Have to go and write it down. I have have notes in my phone, you know, like pages and pages, and pages of notes, in my phone of ideas that I had, and I write them down. You voice memo things? Or do I type them? Yeah, yeah, I only need to type like seven words on on. And then I have the whole ideas in my head. So
I put a lot into the notes in my phone as well and it probably looks like gibberish to a lot of people but I go back through them when I'm on the plane, especially problems. I was
Just with ten years ago or something. And I look at all my arms. Dealing with the same thing, different situation. Same, same me, right? Yeah. There's that we had a amazing psychiatrist on the show but I'd love to hear a conversation between the two. The two of you, his name is Paul continues, train at Stanford and Harvard. He's an amazing guy. Actually talks openly about the the tragedy that his brother killed himself, which was what drove him into Psychiatry and he's interesting.
Guy because he's obviously Highly Educated incredibly smart wrote a book on trauma but he has incredible knowledge about a number of other areas of psychology including narcissism sociopathy. He's worked in a lot of really interesting domains with interesting people that everyone listening on the podcast would recognize who course. He's not going to reveal who those people are. But and you know he talks about the fact that
You know, you can look at different people but he was actually the one that shared with me, this notion of generators and projectors and directed me towards that literature. But when he came on the podcast, he, you know, he talked a little bit about that stuff but he talked mostly about trauma. But then, you know, we were talking about ways in which people engage in the world and different archetypes and how you start looking at stories throughout history and you start seeing the same themes over and over, right? Westerns.
you know, this idea of a guy rides into town and does some repair work, like defeats the Sinister,
Person or things that are imposing on the time than rides to the next town. It's always like it ends with it's going to keep continuing and then but then we got into this discussion of relationship. He talks about, you know, he said this on the podcast, have a patient who, you know, said, you know, I've been in 10 abusive relationships and he'd say, to that patient, know you've been in one relationship 10 times, right? Which is essentially, it's all about your issue, right? That's not you. I'm not purposely, didn't point at you, for those listening and I think that those
Those features of ourselves that we bring from addition to condition can be negative or they can be positive. One thing that's interesting and I hear I'm not trying to solve or understand the Seal team Community per se, but I think they represent an important archetype because they are selected for this ability to take hard conditions and failures and turn them into wins. That's one of the selection criteria seems seems to be there finding who has that capability. I see a lot of and happen to know a few people from the
You'll teams who get out and do really well. Yeah, the great businesses. You're a shining example of this and you have a family and you know, you got German Shepherd to. Yeah. The will talk about animals and little. Yeah, dog is like you surf and you train and like I'm sure you have your Dark Places dark moments and challenges like anybody else. But things look to me like they're going pretty well. And then I also know people in the sea from the SEAL Teams. Okay. They don't go down the path of suicide. Fortunately, but it's sort of like
They don't do as well as I would have thought and I'm certainly not picking on this community. I also see this from people who are professional athletes. I know kids that were phenomenal in high school. I mean, these are like early admission to all the Ivy League schools because that was what happened in the town that I grew up in and I look at them now and I'm like, wow, like Jack. Ah, shit, didn't somehow it's not working out and I think it's important for people to hear that. That, you know, yes. Winning creates the propensity for more winning. Then why do you think it is that
At.
In a community where people are trained to solve problems adapt and make things work. Some people flourish outside the military and some flourish last and some we already talked about really, you know, go down the dark traps. What do you think is the quality that allows people to be really adaptable in particular because most of us live in a landscape where we have to deal with people who are not us
Like people that are not good at what we're good at and sometimes that's an asset. Sometimes it's not you seem to be particularly good at like understanding the human animal and working with that. So again this is a broad question. We're going very Broadband here and we'll get narrower and again in a little bit but I'd love your thoughts on. Like why is it? How is it what determines whether or not somebody thrives in novel
environments?
I have to start off by just by saying I wrote a note as you were talking I just put seal and then I put the not equals sign, you know. Like because you can't say that a seal equals anything by. Excellent point. It's I mean, there's guys, there's guys that have been in the seal teams that are murderers. Like there's like real-life murder like murders like rapists and murderers. That went through Seal training rapists murderers and they're in prison for the rest of our lives like that. That's a thing. There's people that have been in the Seal team
Seems that, you know, got kicked out the SEAL Teams for drugs. And I mean do you name it? And we've got that and we've got guys that are just lazy and we got guys that it just
it's and Physicians. You could say there's about Physicians there, been sociopathic, you know, serial killer positions, And Then There are ones that are in third world countries, right now that would would not accept a billion dollars to stop serving people at the level of the basic medicine that they
deserve. So there's a yeah,
There's the seals that get out and just volunteered to go help in the worst places in the world. So you've got a full spectrum of people. So to say a seal equals success in any domain, the only domain you can say that they're successful as they made it through basic skill training because guys make it through basic skill training, they're not good. Seals like that happens, you know, so you get guys that make it through basic Seal training and they make it through seal qualification training and they make it to a seal team and they get kicked out of the school teams because they're not good.
It seals, they weren't meant to do that job, that happens. So all they've proven by making it through basic skill, training is, they can kind of suck it up for a while and there's also guys that make it through basic Seal training because they learned how to maneuver through the system, they learned what to do and what the minimum requirements were and how they could skate through this. There's guys like that. It's not a huge number but they're absolutely there.
We see them in science, you know, people that go to a lab figure out who the director of the lab is at the level of psychology and
This is actually one of the more dangerous aspects of science. It actually negatively impacts, all of society. I'll just say, and any scientist will know what I'm talking about. They find the big famous labs. They figure out who that leader of the lab is and they get that person. The data they want, they might not make the data up, but they will certainly discard the data that don't fit, right? That, which is one way of making data up by exclusion, right? It's not literally like, painting pictures of cells that aren't there or something, but that happens a lot. And those people often
In go far, they rarely go all the way because pretty soon their reputation you know, expands to the point where people go like yeah I know, one can repeat that result like that but these people sit in very high positions, not at Stanford, right? I will say, I don't know any of my colleagues at Stanford that that meet that those criteria, but you see them. And you see what they're doing and they're basically solving a social engineering thing, they just happen to be doing it in science. Now, why anyone would do that in signs? I don't know because you don't get rich inside.
You certainly don't get famous, but for whatever reason, they figured it out and that's where they're going to do it. And I'm sure you see it in law firms. I'm sure you see in every single domain I right.
Yeah. Now you pointed out that there's some people that make it to the Ivy League schools and they graduate from an Ivy League school in, they don't do well and to me that's a very similar to someone that might make it to the SEAL Teams do well in the SEAL Teams and then they get out and I don't do well, it's probably because what I talked about earlier, when I went to Navy boot camp, here's what you got to do. If you do it. Well, you'll be rewarded.
Well, if you're in high school and your dad, your mom and dad say, hey if you do good in high school, you're going to get into this, Ivy League school, and you get into an Ivy League school. And here's what you need to do in high school, you need to get good grades. You need to be part of the Glee Club, you need it, whatever the things are that. You gotta do, you gotta speak a different language? You got to go volunteer and in Guatemala, in the summertime, you got to do these things and then you'll get into a good college. Once you get into a good college, you got to get this degree, once you get that degree. So they've had a path laid out for them of boxes to check and they go and check the boxes.
They get done. No one has put any more boxes out in front of them so they don't know what to do. And that can certainly happen from in the, from someone, in the SEAL Teams or someone in the military that what they've been. Hey, this is your mission, this is what you got to do. Here's what you need to do. Do well, check the box, check the box, check the box, check the box, and it's time to retire and there's no one put in a box in front of to check. And so unless someone, you know, some guys get out of the SEAL Teams and they go into a big corporate structure and they kick ass because there's someone in the corporate corporate world.
I'm saying, hey here's what you got to do next year and they do great and that's super good for them and they actually really like it. I was talking to a guy the other day, he's like a full-on in a corporation, he's doing a great job. He likes what he's doing? It's awesome. So but I think you get some guys that they don't really have, the open mind to see where opportunities are and they you know, one thing that's nice about the SEAL Teams is
It's, there's a lot of you get a lot of freedom of maneuver, right? You can really do a lot of stuff that you kind of want to do and so when they look at the corporate world they don't see that. They think I don't I'm not going to do that but then they're not quite sure how to take the next step. So I think that's why you might see some guys that aren't super successful because they don't really know what to do and they don't really have a mind. That's open to look for opportunities.
And and also you got some guys that success for them is they're going to hang out with their family and they're going to you know get in good shape and they're going to run some triathlons or competing crop whatever they're going to do, they're going to go do it and that's what they're looking to do. You know, which is, which is also awesome. Go take time to go enjoy your family man, you gave enough to your country. Go go, hang out with your kids. That's success as far as I'm concerned,
too. I agree there. I know far too many people who are successful in their professional lives but who have very diminished personal lives and it is not a
Pretty picture, you know, the you mentioned the parent, kind of driving the kid, do this, do that. In that scenario, I send stones of fear. It's all about not being a failure. It's not actually about love of your craft or what you enjoy, pretty early in my science career. I learned that there are certain people are just ambitious. They just like to win and I used to joke around, it's not polite. But I used to go, you know, we should all just tell that person. That like the new cool thing is like trying to understand the biology of like,
And I would say like feces or something and they'd probably work on it and they'd be like yeah it's like the greatest thing because they actually don't care what they're working on for them. It's just the hunt and I learned that actually people like that can serve an important role because like well there's actually a whole microbiome. They're actually Labs that do work on feces. So forgive me my microbe colleagues that work on microbiomes. But in all seriousness you know people who are just ambitious can be very effective because you put a problem in front of them and it's like a dog, they'll just retrieve. It's like, they're just go as opposed
To love of retrieving for retrieving sake. It's like you give you give it that same, dog. The analogy here, we give that same dog. A high jump in there like, in the high jumping, right, or whatever it is or diving underwater. But I think of people more like animals and more like different dog, species. Like we, as your case was, with music particular, music, and communities or example of shopping for the pants and that experience is like the first time you tap into something that really feels kind of unique to you. You like there's something
Year to be able to find work. That includes that. But also as hard, and also allows you to evolve over time. I mean, I think that's, that's the real. That's the real gift that I think most people are seeking. And, of course, there's no shortcut to that except perhaps one, which is to be able to sense the difference between ambition, and there's no better word for it. Let's just call it what it is, which is love. Like, I love this and the reason I think that love is so powerful. And here, I'm sounding like Lex Friedman but I don't mean
Mean inter-relational, love Irene, like, sort of that being able to sense. What that feels like is that, I do believe that it allows us to tap into an enormous number of things that fear alone and ambition alone and just being a hard-driving. Person alone will not allow us to tap into things like adaptiveness, creativity. And there's and I think there's a really obvious reason for it, which is that the one thing we know about our species is that we
To make more of ourselves and to take good care of our young. Whether or not everyone has kids or not is irrelevant. The point, is that every species not only wants to do that need to do that? And the feeling of Love is really what allows us to be adaptable. I don't think there's anything that trains up adaptability as much as being around kids.
You
just have to be adaptable, right? Because they're one moment, they're up, then they're down. They're disappointed. So, you know you and you shared a really important story about loss of somebody that clearly you loved
And that clearly loved the community. He worked in.
It wasn't just that you guys loved him. Is that he got? He loved you guys and I think that being able to tap into these feelings of love for things for people and for experiences I think is so critical and you know I don't meditate much these days but I have heard of this like love and kindness meditation and I was sound so soft to me. I was thinking, like gosh, what am I supposed to do then float like levitate at the end and like we're of, you know, mu or whatever it's called. I don't know what's the thing. But I my friend who unfortunately,
Want to call a friend, not trying to name drop here, but I'm very fortunate called Rick Rubin. The music producer a friend, and he was the one who started turning me on to different forms of meditation. The ones I mentioned before in this idea that there are forms of meditation, which put us in touch with what he calls the source. Now, this is really getting a little mystical, but I think this all maps back to the same thing, which is that there are sources of dopamine and the other neurotransmitters and us that give us kind of a super power to adapt to anything.
And I think it's at least includes love because that's the most adaptable Emotion by definition because of what's required for evolution. So the question therefore is in yourself and in your observation of people that you've worked with. Did you ever sense that just being hard? Driving was kind of
It was great, but it was limiting like, did you ever sense that like, by liking the people you work with, you could perform much better? Even if they perhaps were not as hard to kind of borrow the common parlance around. This, they weren't as hard as everybody else that because you like each other so, so much that you can kind of do anything.
Well, if you have a team of 10 people and you all have a great relationship and you get along well and you're going against my team and we all hate each.
Each other. And we're who's going to win
the team? That loves each other is going to win. I would
hope it's not even close it's not even a matter of fact, if you work for me and you don't like me, what kind of performance are you going to give me? It's going to be tough. What if you love me? And I've looked out for you and I've done everything for you and I've taken care of you, what kind of performance are going to give me everything all God died for you. So yeah, and you know, earlier you want you asked about the human animal and human nature and
This is part of leadership. I got asked this question the other day by a working with a company and the guy says, you know, how do I identify, what are the characteristics of someone that can execute and how do I identify those characteristics in a person so that I can get those people? And I said, well, first of all, the characteristics are the characteristics that everybody's, you know, obviously, someone that's driven some of the communicate. Well, someone's going to make things happen. Those are those are pretty simple to, to know, we know what they are.
How do you identify? It's pretty simple as well. I give you a task. I give Andrew a task. It's pretty simple task. If you get it done, cool. Give you a little bit more complex tasks. Do you get it done? Yes, I give give the same task to Fred. He doesn't get it done. He comes back with a bunch of questions. He's slow rolls and he's got all kinds of excuses and problems. I give you an even more complex to ask you, come back, you get it done and then I'm going to realize, okay, and who's the guy that makes things happen? He's a guy that can actually execute any
A little bit what you said. I mean, there's certain breeds of dogs, but even that is it did, they're not as as different as human beings are right. Like there and there are some. So now, there are some guys, I've got Andrew whom will make things happen. Here's the problem with Andrew when I say, hey Andrew. Here's this nebulous idea that I have. Can you turn this into a reality? And you're like, where do I start? I'm not sure where you want me to go.
I gave it to the guy that didn't make anything happen with specific tasks that I gave him and he comes back and says, you know, I said, hey, I got this nebulous idea. Can you see what you he goes? Oh yeah. And all of a sudden he takes it and he says have figured out a way to make this happen. So you might have someone that's very good at executing but they're not very creative. I met if somebody that's very creative but they're not very good at executing. So what do I do? I build a team where I've got Andrew and Fred and they work together and Fred comes up with good ideas and we bring them to Andrew and Andrew goes and executes him. So valuable
That's what we're doing from a leadership perspective, is we're letting people's nature.
Execute and person will putting people into roles where their nature is beneficial. I'm not going to take someone that's shy and introverted and put them out in the lead sales role. I'm not going to take somebody that's boisterous and extroverted and put them into a cubicle where they're going to be looking at spreadsheets all day. Clearly, I'm not going to do that. So what we have to do as Leaders is we have to find the right people for the right role and we place them into those roles. Now, does it mean that I abandoned all hope that the guy that's an
It will ever develop more communication skills know I'm still going to work with them. And over time, we'll get him a little bit moving in the right direction, but I'm not going to take somebody that's a total introvert and turn them into a lead sales guy. That's not going to happen anymore. That I'm going to change it, tiger stripes. So that's what we have to do is we have to help people as Leaders. We have to help people find the role and find the thing that they're good at now.
Does that mean if I have someone that loves their job they're going to do better at it. Absolutely. Does it mean that if I have somebody that's driven
Just by achievement that they're going to be good at their job. No, in fact, well, they can be, there's gonna be certain roles. I can put them in right. If I've got a sales number, I need to hit and and Andrew super into achievement. He want, he wants to be the golden child, who wants to have his picture on the, on the, you know, magazine that we put out about our industry. Cool, I can throw this task at you and you're gonna go and get it. The problem is
If there's something that's going to take more perseverance and the reward isn't that high or it's a long-term goal, you're probably not the right guy for the job. So liking your job is absolutely critical and if you love your job, you're going to be able to be going to be able to most likely excel at it. Now, you could be an unfortunate person. That loves your job, is not good at it. That happens. Occasionally, right Ira, seems I sector doesn't seem pretty rare. It reminds me of your skateboarding career. Yeah, love skateboarding. Which
You just weren't that good. I wasn't a good fortune. You
know what? I love more than skateboarding. I love the community. I wasn't, I love the community. I was in and I and you know, I probably would have gone to the industry side or worked on a company side and not been on the actual skateboards I or just keyboard for fun. So, there's a guy in the skateboard. Communities name is, Jim Thibault, and he's kind of The Not So hidden secret. In the, in that Community. He's an amazing guy. And he's sort of early on left, professional skateboarding to run a company, real Deluxe, a bunch of other companies. He's an amazing guy.
He told me the we become friends recently, he said he realized he wasn't going to be one of the big guys, but he knew he want to be in this community. So he found his place and I think everyone in skateboarding. Looks to Jim as like the guy, who cares. He's, you know, he cares about, he truly cares about the sport and about the people. And so he learned to kind of just wrap his arms and his heart around the whole thing and it just works. And so I do think everyone has a certain place in a community or in a team. I think that as you're describing this, I have to imagine that people are listening and
Thinking like wow this team thing is awesome like it's just amazing. I wish I had that right. I'm fortunate to have that in my podcast. I've had that my lab certainly in the my podcast team out. I always say these guys go I go like like it's not just its people to press buttons and run equipment. Take photos like they go, I go like they go it's over and I'm fine with that. I actually love that because it's it's yes, it's about the podcast but and about the information and getting it out there. But it's as much about the team.
And working together, just like, it was with skateboarding. So, hopefully I'm better at podcasting. It was Escape where I kept getting broke off as the skateboard say, in skateboarding, too often. But I want to ask, like, in your family life, do you look at that as a team? Like you think like this is my team and they're different and how can we
synergize? Yeah, and you've got to look at every team like that. What are the strengths and weaknesses of the team and who's going to be good at what? And how do you put people in positions, where they're going to be able to excel? I mean, what's his name? Tebow,
is that a gym Thibault Jim?
I'm fibo. Yeah.
Imagine if he had a mentor that was only saying, listen, you got to be a pro skater. This is your only opportunity. There's nothing else and he didn't have the ability to take a step back and say, you know what man, like I'm not back, I'm not gonna be good enough but I really love this industry. So so luckily for him he figured that out and you know, you talked about the superpower of being like loving your job. The one thing I claim to be a super power is the ability to take
Take a step back and attach, which I guess is going back to your meditation thing. But being able to take a step back and look at your life and say, man, I've been skateboarding longer than that guy and he's better than me. And I've been skateboarding longer than that other guy, and he's better than me.
I'm probably not going to be this, probably not the right job for me. What could I do where I could use my skill set? And obviously, he had some entrepreneurial spirit and, and was able to figure that out. So, being able to be a part of a team and it's goes to what I was saying earlier about the mob, being able to be part of a team, part of the mob, part of the gang, but still have the ability to take a step back detach, from that and assess. What is the best way for this team to move forward? I mean, you could have this
Lillian idea that from now on you're going to make all of your podcasts about the molecular structure of whatever.
And you know, the rest of the team, probably need to pull you aside and say, hey man, like I know you really care about that and that's awesome but everyone really wants to hear about this other stuff. So, let's tie it in together. Let's expand what you this specifically, you want to talk about. So being able to take a step back detach and see the bigger picture to me is the true superpower of Life of life and it's a lot harder than it sounds. And you know, this goes back to
To when you start talking about people that are having going through struggles in life, right? And I've described this before, as you know, if I'm looking at you, and you're, you're in a bad state, right? You're depressed, you're sad. You're moping around, you're not getting anything done.
And I'm looking at you from the outside. And, and I'm thinking for me, I see this storm cloud around your head, right? I see the storm cloud around your head and you're in there and all you see, no matter what direction you look is storm. All you see is Darkness, I'm outside. I'm looking about the, hey, man, this guy's got a great education, he's healthy. He's got a good team around him. Like he's got all these things going for him, but you in that state, you literally cannot see.
Anything, but the darkness of the storm. And that's what's so scary about when people enter that mode is, you can look, I can look at it from the outside and be like Andrew, you just gotta move like four feet forward and you're going to be through this thing and yet you're, you might hear me say that you go, no Jocko, I'm looking ahead, there's nothing but Darkness, so helping people move forward, take action, and be able to get that perspective detach and get outside themselves. Get outside their own heads.
Tim Ferriss should get out of your head, get into your body. That's one way to do it. Take action, go do things, but it's very it's very scary and I'm sure you've had this experience where you're talking to someone that you know,
And they're bogged down in whatever problem. It is whatever stress they're under and you're looking at him going, hey man, it's going to be okay. Like you can clearly see that whatever their whatever is bothering them and dragging them. Now you can clearly see you know a lot of times it's a relationship, right? The girl of the guy they got, they got dumped and you got payment that person was a disaster. Anyways, you're better off without him and they cannot compute that they are stuck there or maybe
It's the school that they didn't get into or the job that they didn't get and they get so wrapped up in that they can't stay can't get out of that storm and it's so it's such a helpless feeling to sit there and tell someone hey you you just move a little bit towards me and you're gonna get out of this storm and it's so much easier said than done. And, and that's why trying to engage with people and trying to give people that super power of Detachment where they can take a step.
Back and say, you know what, you're right, man. That girl, she wasn't who I really thought she was. I should move on. Yes. But
Easier said than done. And that's one of the biggest challenges. I think that that we have is friends and in parents and teammates is helping people. Learn to detach learn to see the bigger picture, learn to see that the problem that you have that your whole world is actually not that big of a deal. You know what I wrote? I've written a bunch of kids books and one of the things that triggered me to write kids books.
Is realizing that, you know, one day, my daughter came home as my oldest daughter and she came home from school and she's like, I, she says, I'm stupid. What do you mean you're stupid. She's I'm stupid. I'm dumb, why do you think that know, whatever great it is when you're supposed to know your times tables? Don't know my times tables. I said, oh well, how much have you studied?
She kind of gave me the confused. Look what you want? What do you mean? Studied I said, have you studied yet? Have you made flashcards to learn them and she didn't she hadn't she thought she should just know them from, you know, the teacher went over what they are now. She should know. I'm like felt some other kids in the class did. And and so I'm sitting there going. Oh yeah, cool. We'll just, you know, we'll make some flashcards and she made flashcards. She learned her two times tables and 45 minutes and we were good, but what struck me was.
To me, I was like, oh no big deal to her, it was her whole life.
And then I got see that with my other kids, you know, somebody said something to them in The Recess yard and I'm like, screw that kid. They don't know what they don't worry about them. But when you're, that's their whole world and that unfortunately doesn't only apply to kids, it applies to adults as well. And they get this problem in their world that seem so insurmountable. And so massive because that little ecosystem that they're stuck in is there were
world and they run into this problem in that and it's disruptive in that world. And they don't know how to get out of it. You know, I've I said, I did a podcast talking about these ecosystems that people get into, right? And there's all these ecosystems urine ecosystem, we're both in it. A shared ecosystem of podcasting, and we could be like, oh my gosh, you know, Lex just came out with a new podcast and it's been the biggest success. And what can I do to catch up with Lex and? And all of a sudden, I could get really bar, you could get really
why we could be bothered by that. The think man, I'm a failure. Meanwhile, there's people that don't listen to podcasts. There's people that don't even know what a podcast is and yet it's our whole world. If we let it be you're in the academic world. Hey, you go, you, you're a professor at Stanford, which is a big deal.
In that world. The I know people that don't give a rat's ass they couldn't. They don't know where Stanford is. I get that all the time. They don't know where stay for this. It's no big deal in the SEAL Teams, same thing. Somebody has a problem in the SEAL Teams and they think this is the whole world and I blew it. And and now what are they going to do? When you're facing a significant problem in life relationship? A problem with a job, you got a number that you're in one ecosystem. And if you step outside of that ecosystem, no one really cares.
Ours. And you could go move into a hold of a totally different ecosystem and find happiness there. But at least utilize that to get out of that storm cloud that you're in and you're going to find that there's plenty of light out there in the world move towards that and it's going to be a much better situation
in the spirit of authenticity. Everything you're saying it's directly home for me you know. I don't know what people's perceptions of me are I actually try not to spend too much time thinking about that and just really try and stay in touch
With the source. And I really do believe in this notion that our love of things is, what can generate energy, and I try and use action to generate energy, but also I happen to also love exercise. So, that's an easy one there, for me, but I try and stay in that mode, but to be quite honest, I've spent much of my adult life and probably too much of My Teenage life and twenties. You're not quite an adult right in your twenties. At least I certainly wasn't in.
Challenging relationships.
That admittedly, we're challenging because of my role in them. Also, of course, right. And each and every time, I remember thinking, moving on from, this is like this insurmountable thing in part because I am a caretaker, and I cared and, you know, it wasn't just about me and a selfishness. It was about wanting to, right? All the wrongs of that person's past. Like, you know, I found myself trying to be a time machine for people. I found myself trying to fix their family lives, after found myself, doing all of that. And also ignoring all the things I
Need to focus on in terms of bettering myself and making sure I was showing up correct, and on and on and there are data in the world of in the form of these people that that know me very, very well that I think would say that and a whole lot more. Right. The point isn't those specific relationships but each and every time you know, someone would come along and say like listen if this isn't good for you it's not good for them. Or this is a bad situation or this isn't serving either of you. Well, but
I was like myopic like this big in that not even soda, straw view of the world likes and Speck of the world and trying to solve. Because that's my naturally, I want to solve this, I'm going to solve it, I'm going to solve it and sometimes things were solved for some period of time and sometimes they weren't. And I think one thing that just as a confessional, like, I will say, I could really learn the art of detachment.
I could really learn to focus on that more. If that's the proper language word. I think I'm pretty good at adapting. I think I'm pretty good at finding good people. I'm certainly love my team and this and that all feels like natural Synergy although it's hard work in lab and in the podcast but I think the sort of tenancy that I have as a problem, solver is to assume that every problem can be solved in there for staying on this problem, until it is solved, is the answer and maybe
The art of Detachment and getting some perspective would help, because if I look back, I certainly don't regret the experiences. I've had, but I wasted far too much time and I frankly I'd probably wasted far too much of other people's time trying to solve problems. That could not be solved. And I think without going into this in any more detail and of course you're not you can send me a bill at the End. By the way, I think
this is some actions are free man.
Yeah, so I think that being a problem. Solver is great being forward Center.
This is great, I think learning the systems of the brain and body and Understanding Psychology and learning about oneself, you know, the Oracle had it right. Know thyself in ways that you can maneuver functionally in your life and career and relationship Etc great. But I think there's also a downside to being overly fixated. There's like my Bulldog Costello used to be like chewing on something chewing us on the next thing. I know he's chewing on his foot and you're like, hey and you'd have to like rip them off as own footing, you've got because that chew reflex was just so
Strong that sometimes it would turn on himself and that's kind of how it feels.
Yeah. I wrote a book called leadership strategy and tactics and one of the one of the things that I wrote about in that book is like understanding, what's important and what's not and this is very similar to what you're talking about. Looking looking at a problem and taking a step back and going, well, a is this important or not and B is this solvable or is it not and see what's the ROI on getting it solved. Unless the efforts going to take to get this problem solved, and how much is really going to impact my
World and my life if I focus on it. So knowing and understanding when something is important or not is a very good skill and again it's a skill that's directly related to attached Detachment because when you're in that relationship is another thing. I've been telling people lately, the the solution to your problem is not going to be found in the problem. It's not going to be found in there. You have to get out of the problem so that you can look at it, make an assessment and you can assess how to solve.
The problem or whether you need to solve the problem or not. I mean there's a lot of things in my life right now where I shrug my shoulders and go okay, but it's okay someone saying this. Okay Roger that but carry on no Factor move on and then occasionally you go. Okay. This is something I need to contend with is something I need to deal with. This is something I need to shape, or adjuster move, or, or solve to use to use your word.
the reason I laugh, when I say that is because
Problems, you have to get in there. But if you take a step back, you can usually say oh little adjustment here, a little adjustment there. And that thing's going to sort itself out. So Detachment is a superpower man.
It certainly is and it certainly one that I need to focus on more. I'm, I'm grateful for bringing that up. Is this is the biologist in me. But, you know, what is your process for engaging Detachment or for disengaging? Is it an active process? Where you go? You know? I'm I'm going to detach from this. I'm going to put myself in a situation that is pulling on me. There's this gravitational force and I'm going to create some imagery in my mind of walking away from it. Do I physically walk away from it?
It do? I Outsource it to somebody else? What? What are some tools for
detachment? Yeah. This is one of those situations where you and I had a discussion about the science and the practical application aligned. So, my original experience with Detachment was and this is one of those moments where, you know, I said a lot of times things are just small moments over time and you make a little adjustment. This is one of those moments in my life and I wrote about leadership strategy and tactics where
I recognized like in a moment, what Detachment was and how helpful it was, I'm on an oil rig doing a training Mission. My whole platoon is in a skirmish line, looking at a large area of the oil rig that we're supposed to be clearing again this not combat, this is in the 90s, there's nothing going on with doing training and I'm standing in the Skirmish line. And by the way, I'm the youngest and most Junior guy in my platoon and I'm standing there looking down the sight of my
And I'm waiting for someone to make a call and tell us what to do.
And I wait for 5 seconds and I wait for 10 seconds and I wait for 20 seconds and no one's saying anything. And we're waiting for a leader in my platoon to make a call to tell us what to do, tell me what to do. And finally, after like 30 seconds which seems like an eternity, I can't take it anymore. And so I take a step like a, like a foot one foot step 12 inches. I take a step off the Skirmish line. I look to my left. I look to my right. And what I see is every other guy in my platoon,
June is staring down their weapon staring down the site of the weapon, which means their field of view is Tiny. It's like a 20 degree field of view, you're looking down thus the scope of your weapon of the sight of your weapon and that's how big their field of view. Is that I'm looking, I'm thinking oh there's my platoon Commander, she's looking down, the scope of the sight of his weapon. There's my platoon Chief, he's looking down the side of his weapon. There's my leading petty officer, he's looking down the side of his weapon. There's my assistant Commander, he's looking down. So everyone in the platoon is looking down the side of their weapon which means they all have
Very narrow field division. Well, when I take a step back and look to my left, and look to my right, guess what kind of field of vision, I got a massive one, I can see the whole scene and I can see exactly what it is. We need to do. And at that moment, look as a new guy, you need to keep your mouth shut, you don't say anything and I'm thinking well, but no one else is saying anything. So I muster up all the courage I can and I opened my mouth and I say hold left. Clear, right?
Right? Which is a basic tactical. No, no. This is not a patent level genius maneuver. It's just a normal call to make in a situation that we were in. I say hold left, clear, right?
And I'm expecting to get kind of slapped old. Shut up new guy but instead everyone just repeats the call, hold left, clear right? Hold left, click right. And they we execute the maneuver and we finish the clearance of this oil rig and we'll get done. We get to the top of the oil rig which means we cleared the whole thing. We're on the Helo Deckard at the top and we gonna do a debrief and now I'm expecting. Okay, now I'm going to get told, hey, what were you doing? You need to keep your mouth shut and instead the between Chief goes a, hey jock, oh good call.
On the seller deck down there.
And I was kind of like. Yeah, that's right. But then I thought to myself, hold on a second. Why?
If I'm the youngest most Junior guy in this platoon, why was I able to see what we needed to do and make that call? Why did that? Why did that just happened? And then I realized it was because I took a step back.
To use a your term, I broadened my field of view which allowed me to think more clearly because instead of being hyper focused and narrowly focused like broaden my range of vision. I took a breath before I made my call, right. I had to take my, take a nice breath to to speak clearly.
And I realized that taking a step back and detaching. I got to see infinitely more than even the most experienced guys in my platoon. And I started doing it all the time and I started doing it in land Warfare. I started doing it in urban combat. I started doing it in all these tactical training scenarios these are just training. This is the 90s started doing these training centers and it always
Allowed me to see what we needed to do.
And then I started doing it like when I was having conversations with people and having a conversation with a tune Chief and I can see that he's starting to turn a little red in the face and we don't we're about to argue about something. I said, oh wait a second, I'm taking a step back looking. Oh, he's getting mad right now and he's the platoon Chief. You better just deescalate this thing real quick and I said, hey, you know what? Chief that sounds good. Let me go take a look real and we'll go to relook at the plan or whatever.
and so I started to do this, kind of with my normal life was to not get wrapped up in my own emotions, not get wrapped up in the the gunfight that was happening right in front of my face, not to get wrapped up in the details of what was going on but instead take a step back detach look around and then you can make a bet much much better decision and it's not
It's exponential you. If you're looking down the sights your weapon and you take a step back and you look around it's exponential how much more you can see. Now listen if you are the only person in a gunfight we it's going to be harder for you to do that because you got to be focused on whatever you're shooting at. But when you have 16 guys or 20 guys, they're all looking in the same direction, it's very easy to be the guy that goes on to take a step back. Look around.
Make a call. So when you talk about the mechanics, when I teach this to people, now the mechanics of it, take a step back. Literally, you're at, you know, you and I are in a meeting. There's a bunch of people. This starts to get heated argument. I will literally push my chair back away from the table. Change my perspective perspective, open widen my field of view.
The other thing that's like on the in the SEAL Teams, you don't want to, you don't want to sound panicked on the radio.
For a couple reasons number one, because when you panic on the radio it's going to cause other people to panic. Number two, if you panic on the radio and you sound panicked, everyone's gonna make fun of you. So you we do when you get back from the mission. Everything lamb. Yeah. You sounded like a baby out there. So what would I do before? I key up my radio.
Take a breath. And so, here, I'm manually. Slowing down my breath. I'm broadening my field of view. So if you're in a meeting or you're in a, you know, you're at the at the supermarket parking lot. And someone starts to yell at you, take a step back, take a breath. Broaden. Your field of view detach from those emotions that you're having and make some space.
And that's, that's how I go through the mechanics of Detachment. Now I can tell you right now.
I mean when you when you do this all the time which I kind of do this all the time. Yeah I don't I don't really have to like step back but when you're starting to be able to try and do this absolutely make them again and I'll tell you, there's another like weird little Nuance thing.
Lift your chin up.
And put your hands down. Now, this is not a combat situation. I know not in a fight, but here's the thing. When, when when I get defensive what am I going to do? I raise my hands up and put my chin down. That's like a fighting mode. So if you and I are having a discussion and I'm starting to get heated and I'm starting to like, oh, he's not listening to me instead of me putting my chin down and put my hands, like, up up to, where I can put them in your face a little bit. No, I'm actually take a step back and say, put my chin up, it changes my perspective, a little bit more.
It changes, my visual perspective just but changing the angle of my head, take a step back, put my hands down and not being a defensible. I actually want to hear what you have to say. And if I start listening to what you have to say, and not talking, it's very hard to be detached when you're talking, it's another key component, you want to detach, shut your mouth. So I'm in meetings, you know, I in a bunch of different companies. I'm running a, but I have a bunch of. Now, I own a bunch of different companies. I'm in a meeting in my company's, I'm not the one that's doing all the Talking in.
Act, I'm doing mostly listening when I'm in task unit Bruiser my task unit. I'm not sitting there giving the entire brief. No, I'm letting the platoon Chief in the platoon commanders. Give those briefs.
And that way, I'm detached, I'm listening to what they have to say. I'm more capable of seeing what holes there are in their plans by not moving my mouth, not talking, I'm listening. So those are some of the methodologies that I use and then I advise people to use in order to effectively start down the pathway of being able to detach in various
scenarios.
I love it again. I'm saying I love it because I do love it and thank you. I think it's a wonderful technique we've talked before on your podcast in some of my listeners. Maybe not all this podcast. Will be familiar with the fact that when we narrowly focus our Gaze on one target, a number of things happen. Our visual World becomes constricted, of course, but also that we start slicing time more finally and the dopamine system tends to start doing a kind of a anticipation and trying to guide and direct things in that narrow tunnel of view. Whereas
As when we literally take on panoramic Vision so not necessarily moving our head around, although one could but broadening our field of view or looking at our Horizon especially if we're walking but getting that kind of not kind of getting a broader field of view, we sliced time differently, things don't feel as imposing on us. This is the physiological substrate underlying what you're describing and I think it's it goes a step further because in that open larger aperture of visual understanding,
Is an open larger window of cognitive understanding and new options start to surface, right? I mean I think this is I've long been fascinated by the fact that this actually be. I'll tell the real quick story in 2015, I was I went over to Spain to do some monitoring with Wim Hof. This wasn't as I want a podcast, I didn't have any social media. I just went over there because I'd heard this guy with contacted him somehow arranged a trip for myself. And I went over there and we did some crazy dangerous mountaineering that I had no business doing almost
Ripped my left leg off in a stunt that was organized by others there that I never should have done in any case one day look and women is like crouched on the ground next to a like a curb in this parking lot before a hike, he's down on the ground a little stick. And so what are you doing? He's like look. And there were ants climbing up this thing and he's like,
their mountaineering is curb and this guy's different, right? But then I realized we were about to do the same thing up this big face and I thought, wow, like he's able to think at these different scales and see similarities. I thought that's pretty cool. I would have never stopped to look there and I'll say I still remember it right? And I was it profound know. It was it interesting? Yeah. In the sense that things are happening at all scales, all the time and we think we know the scale to pay attention to
And we think that that's the one that matters most and I think it's fair to say that in a gunfight like there is a scale that matters most but new options New Perspectives, actually come from that broader field of view which is what you're describing and later that day is interesting because this group going up, some of them were really challenged in the in the climb and went back to this example of how the ants would stack on top of one another. And he used an analogy from that to help people through this climb. And there's a beautiful pool at the top etcetera, etcetera. Anyway, I think
That these examples are in fact, meaningful, especially the ones that you gave because they don't just relate to military. I mean, you can imagine around the dinner table. I've had this, you know, kids are there and partners there, and sometimes it's really nice to sit back and just kind of hear it all in Baskin at all. But oftentimes like new information will surface. Like you said you know they all I'm hearing is worries out of this person or they're not even really hear they're all talking about what we're going to do next next time. Next time next time and like you re anchor people to like hey like
Maybe let's focus on what we're doing here or sometimes, people are hyper focus on what's happening there and they need to think about something in the future. I love this. I need to practice Detachment in a number of different, domains of my life. One thing that I am realizing after hearing you describe the process, I really need to do is I need to start taking some time away from my work, maybe even a little bit of time, parallel to relationship, to sort of, get a better perspective on it. Because I think the problem solving nature and us
Really makes us myopic, really makes us
nearsighted. Yeah, that's you. See this a lot. I mean, I get to see this a lot, we do events with companies businesses and we go off-site somewhere where they're detached. They're just, they're defacto detached from their day-to-day business. You pull someone out of their business for two days and all of a sudden they start seeing the solutions but they never see them. It's lot harder for them to see them when they're
The firefight, you get them out of the fire fight. It's hard for them to see it when they're in that acquisition. That they're doing, how we going to merge these two cultures. This is going to be impossible. Boom, pull him out. All right, let's talk about the new cultures and and let's talk about what possible outcomes are and all of a sudden you get them to take a step back, the the solutions will appear and any it is true in a gunfight. Now, listen, if it's a one-on-one gunfight, even then the ability to take a step back and look around, will you
Has your peripheral vision you have to be able to do this. It's going to increase its exponential how much eating. That's why it's like a superpower, it's like cheating, it's like cheating, you know, I was speaking of set stones, that stone took over, he became a task unit, Commander, troop Commander when we got back from ramadi. And so now he's the guy in charge and now I was running the training and a couple months into his training. He broke his neck, broke his
His vertebrae in his neck. His spinal cord was okay. So he was, you know, the guy with the big neck brace on. And he couldn't do any arduous training and his, his seal task unit, which is two platoons was going through their land Warfare training and he couldn't do it. He couldn't carry a rucksack, couldn't carry a machine gun so he couldn't do it. So I said, hey, I'm coming out. Let's go out and you can observe your guys and see how they're doing.
And so, there we are. We're out in the desert. His troop is going through field. Training exercise, or full mission profile. So it's like a big fake operation, there's a fake Target, there's fake bad. Guys were using these laser, these high speed laser guns to shoot and we're kind of standing on this little berm and at a certain point in the operation his whole task unit like 40 guys gets pinned down in this little Ravine and so we're just kind of standing in the Ravine with these guys and no one's
Making any decisions and the enemy with these laser guns are starting to maneuver and starting it. You're killing guys, because these laser guns, you can die. And Seth like he hits me on the arm he said can I can I tell them what to do? And I was like, no look, let him figure it out. So another 30 seconds passed, another guy gets killed with laser. He hits me again, bro. Let me, let me say something to him and I was like, No, let him figure it out. Another minute goes by two more, guys are now dead.
Just laser dead, but they're dead and he hits me again. He's like Pro, let me tell him and I go. All right, go ahead, tell him. And so he just crouches down next to one of the guys and bangs him on the shoulder, he'll right?
In which is a again, it's just a fundamental basic call and the guy shouts it out, peel, right? And they start peeling, right? In another minute later. They're all out of the Kill Zone and everything's okay. And then Seth looks at me and he goes, man, this is so easy way up here.
And I said, bro, look at where we are, we are in the Ravine with the guys. We're now we're on Annie and the guys are laying down but it's not this. We weren't on some elevated position and I said, hey, it's not that when an elevated position. It's just that were detached and looking around. And he goes, oh my God. And I said, hey, you remember, when you and I went through this training and he goes, yeah, and I go. This is what it was like for me all the time. I was constantly just looking around.
So that's why it seems like a magic power, right? It's like a superpower cuz, you know, Seth's down there with his gun, and he's shooting. I'm like, hey, bro, move your guys over to that. Go to that Ridge line right there set security, boom. And he. How did you? How did Jocko see that? Choco must be a tactical genius. No, I'm not a tactical genius. I'm just taking a step back and looking around and this and like you just said it applies to everything that we do, if you're having a conversation with your significant other and you start to see that there,
I'm frustrated about something. Now, look, if you're in the conversation 100%, you're going to get frustrated to, you're going to get frustrated. They're frustrated, next thing, you know, you've got to, you've got an emotional argument going on, whereas, if you take a, take a mental step back and say, wait, it, why are they frustrated right now?
Oh, because I'm trying to solve their problem when really what they're looking to do is vent. Okay, got it. Let him vent. Okay, cool. How that sounds horrible? You know, what do you think you're going to do instead of saying? Well, if that's the problem, here's what you should do because people are always looking for that. So, yeah, this this thing this ability is and it's something that can absolutely be trained, and that's what's cool about. It can absolutely be trained. It's not a natural gift, it's some people be better at it than others, but it's something that you can train. And I used to see
See guys develop and I see people developing now in the business world where they'll report back to me you know all we had a meeting with the union today and the union started escalating what they wanted to do and I just took I detached and we ended up the escalating and now we got a solution. So this is an absolute skill set that can that can be learned and that's what that's what makes it especially nice because there's some people look if you're very articulate.
Born very some people are born more articulate than other people. Some people are born with an ability to simplify things, more than others, and you can train. You know, you could become more articulate. You can become, you can learn to simplify things more. And some people are going to be naturally good at detaching but but everyone can get better at it. And that's a beautiful thing is a beautiful
thing and I'm highly incentivized to do this. I mean there are areas of my life they're going really well that I also want to apply it there. I think that I've
Tended to rely on people close to me as a way to access this Detachment. I will be very direct in saying that. You know, I am not the leader of my podcast. There is a leader, it is not me, I'm part of the team, but it is not me. And I often rely on his input and sometimes that input is solicited and sometimes it's not one place for instance, where you see people getting really myopic as on social media, right? And, you know, and I
Experience this, you know, I'd love to say that I'm always nonreactive and I think in general I take the stance that I have filters so I have filters. I know why I'm there, right? I'm interested in being a teacher and a giver and informing people and about the beauty and utility a biology. That's why I say it's not a mission statement, it's a fact that's what I care about, anything that doesn't fit through that filter, really have any business doing but occasion. I like to, you know, make a joke or something, but occasionally, something comes through and
You and I find myself, wait a second and you get sucked into that tunnel. And sometimes it's observing other people in tunnels. And when you're not in the tunnel, it's so obvious. What's happening right? You're watching in some cases people just dragging their lives in some cases, sinking their entire careers. I mean, the former chair of Psychiatry at Columbia University in New York made an absolutely foolish
Truly insensitive, totally inappropriate tweet. That's my opinion. And I think it was the opinion of all the people that fired him from his job. This person was at the Apex of his career, lost his job for saying, something terrible and in retrospect was like said something like I don't know what I was thinking you know and so this guy's a psychiatrist. So his he lives in the in the study and the treatment of the mind, which just goes to show that everyone, I think is susceptible to being pulled into these tunnels.
And fortunately everyone is susceptible to learning to teach themselves how to ratchet themselves out of it. So I love this idea of a teachable skill. I'm certainly going to practice it in one-on-one and in groups situations and an, in a variety of situations, I think that the tunnel is has a gravitational. Pull is like an Allure to that tunnel. And I always just go right back to the neurochemistry. I think that there's something about solving a problem inside of a tunnel like an animal on a chase, you know, but at some point
You know, that animal could get picked off by a, you know, a run over by a truck because it was didn't have enough situational awareness. I'm definitely gonna practice this through opening the gays, you know, and broadening gays. And I think I also am due for a couple days off from things to just walk and think about work on these Retreats, do people work on work, are they just there to do other things? And that's where the idea is.
Surface will do a little bit of both. So we'll do some stuff that is focused on work but then we'll pull out and do things that are completely unrelated.
Related to work to for that very reason, whether we do something physical, whether we do something some kind of a mental exercise, but we do things that are completely unrelated to their work and, and take those breaks in order for them to free their mind.
You know what bothers you about social media. This is when you say that, there's some things that kind of like make you mad.
Yeah, I mean, not me. But, you know, could we do course? Of course, like I'm human, you know, little things little things treatment. It's not the things that are obvious is actually not direct critique of me. It's, it's when people exploit misunderstandings to try and create a greater misunderstanding, that doesn't exist. That's what gets me because to a scientist that's like the most irritating thing. I don't know what the analogy would be in the seal.
Teams but it's like someone like hijacking something that like they didn't mean that but then they kind of think they distort the argument the word gaslighting gets thrown around a lot. Now a lot of people actually think that anytime someone States a boundary like no I don't believe that. That that's gaslighting. Trust me the psychiatrist who are all professionally? Trained tell me that is not gaslighting, guess he's a very particular thing where you're trying to alter someone's reality in a very active, almost like sociopathic way. So I just want, that's a little editorializing right there. What bothers me is when people
Hi Jack. You know sometimes someone in a in an argument is in a sophisticated with their language to somebody else. So someone will hijack that lack of sophistication and trying to flip them on their back that sort of thing really gets under my skin because I feel that creates unnecessary divide. There are a few other things but you know I always joke in my lab and I'll say we're not, you know, I have 3,000 pet peeves but I also have like 3,000 flaws to match each one of those pet peeves.
Yeah, I whenever I'm in this
Not just social media, but it's just life, you know. And somebody says something about me or to me that I don't like what I realized years ago is like the reason I don't like it is because there's some truth in what they're saying. And the best thing to do is to say either to yourself, if you're by yourself or to them is to say. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You're right. I am kind of a knucklehead sometimes or. Yeah. You're right. I sometimes do jump to conclusions or yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
You're right. I was completely wrong about that and that is just so much more Liberty liberating and healthy than saying you don't know what you're talking about or. No, I don't. It just going in to that defensive mode and and trying to close your mind instead of opening your mind up to listen to what somebody else has to say. And say yeah, that's a good point, I'm your spot on with that one.
Next question, next comment let's go
one thing I appreciate about you on social media. Is the The Limited number of words in each of your responses. That's a it's a great thing. It is forcing you to be efficient and concise, actually is a huge Advantage. It also forces you to be precise. At least about category, right? I think there's there's something to be said for that. Well,
there's a good example. So I was on social on Twitter the other day since Twitter's getting getting
Getting a lot of getting a lot of traction right now, is a lot of may have going on in the other gun fight and somebody asked me somebody said, hey I'm going to boot camp soon. What advice do you have for me? And I wrote back? Enjoy, boom. And like you said, I mean, it's Twitter. I'm responding to a bunch of people and then somebody else chimed in and said,
You know, might as well not even answer Jocko, that's not helping this guy at all, and look at your face for those. You that are watching your face, just got a little bit. Matt, right. You got a little bit defensive for
me. Yeah, I well I think that's my nature. I don't like seeing other people sort of attacked. I think that's just my
nature. A split-second of Who, the hell's this guy. And I said, you know what? He's right. And then I tweeted again, back. Like I said, sorry, man, you're right. What I should have said, was hey.
Read the book leadership strategy and tactics. It's a good book for someone that is going to be in an environment that's going to be challenging and we're going to be faced with leadership challenges and enjoy boot camp because if your mindset is this is socks and this is terrible. Your it's going to be terrible and it's going to suck and if you go with the mindset of, hey, this is a cool experience and I should enjoy it. You're going to have a much better time. That's my full answer.
Writing give you and it's perfectly fine. Like that guy was right to critique me and he was right in saying that. And there was a bunch of what's funny, is a bunch of other people came to my defense. Yeah, this guy, that's really great. And it's so, so but my point is, instead of me getting defensive and crazy and letting it dry me crazy, open my mind a little bit listen to what they have to say. Except that there's got to be some level of Truth in it. And there was, I gave a guy, a very, very terse response. And I could have expanded on it more and I did.
No, big deal.
Good Times
night. A few minutes ago. I was thinking to myself. I wonder where your mind is that like in the few moments before you fall asleep, like, are you able to make yourself go mind blank, pretty easily? It's something I've been practicing more because I tend to again room and I like to drill into problems. Obviously, yesterday I did a solo episode which when we do those that are usually anywhere from five to 20 hours of prep and then the recordings I won't say how long they take, but but I love going into the tunnel, right? The tunnel is
The that's where the juices for me and finding the structure, and I have the benefit of amazing producer, helps me, sort through it. And what I kind of like, came out of this thing and then went home, couldn't eat. So I was like, I don't want dinner and then I was explaining a call. I had with a colleague the other day and, you know, my partner, she my girlfriend. She was just like, you know, like okay, like, I'm going to sleep and I was like, up and like, think you're texting. Like, thinking writing notes down, I thought. Oh, yeah. Like, I'm like, Costello, like chewing on the stick and like, they chew and into my pot. I need, I need sleep.
Leap need to go to sleep. So I think I have a bit of a harder time disengaging clearly. And this is why I never touched cocaine or amphetamine because I think that some of us have a love of the dopamine circuitry that I always sensed if I were to have tried drugs like that that they might have been the the thing that would like hit my neural circuits. Just right. You know, some talk about alcohol, that way, I've read books by alcoholics, like the book dry and few other rich,
Paul talks about this that he drank alcohol for the first time in college. It was like this Elixir that filled his body that made him feel right for the first time. Like that's not how I feel after a couple of drinks. I feel a little relaxed but I can do without it. But this drilling into something is really. That's my guess. Maybe that's my I don't think it's a superpower but I have some some strength there but I think it's also the thing that cut that can cut on the other side.
Yeah. When you started off this conversation early, you talked about, you know, getting up in the morning and do you just get up and
You have these novels about to go down the path of like it's at nighttime when I'm trying to go to sleep and I have some random thought about something that can be a hard. I have a visual thing that's going on. It seems like I'm on a roller coaster and I'm going in like a new idea comes and I'm just like, on this awesome ride and I guess not going to stop and I can't, I don't know how to stop
that.
No, no. I mean I think it goes with people who are very driven and, and like, to master different crafts. I have a colleague. His name was Karl deisseroth. He's a bioengineer. He has five children and he's a psychiatrist. He's like an incredible. Like one of these people with does a ton very likely will win the Nobel Prize. I mean, he's an amazing scientist amazing guy and he does this practice that he does. She's not a meditation which he sits for an hour late at night, after his kids have gone to sleep and he forces himself forces himself to
In complete sentences with punctuation about some problem. I tried doing that for about five minutes and I fell off, but it's a something that he's cultivated in himself which helps him in his career, right? I don't think this is certainly not something. I recommend if I did that at 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning and that would be bad for my sleep because falling asleep. Actually requires drifting into these kind of liminal States. It's one of the reasons why I'm a big proponent of things like non sleep deep rest, or these Yoga Nidra practices, which are basically body scans where you're trying to.
Learn to detach from the sensory world and they're very effective. It certainly for me, they've been very effective at teaching me to turn off thinking, which is an interesting notion in its own, right? But I like the idea of Detachment by stepping back and getting perspective. My, my father is much better at that. He's a very calm guy in the world of Confrontation. I always knew when I was a kid because he would blank, which meant like something was going to happen. Like I was going to get it and now but I've always knows he can control his his
It says it is behavior. Others of us in the family. You know, the side from New Jersey were more like go to loggerheads. So, I don't know if this raises a question, and I think it's one that I and several other people. I talk to in anticipation this podcast were asking. You know, I think one reason why people are drawn to people who have been in the SEAL Teams and you in particular are that I think everybody not just males but females to I think everybody wants to know
Like their calibration point on their level of toughness. I think people wonder, you know, I think when people talk about Buds and all that, I think a lot of people wonder would I make it through, right? I've certainly wondered it. I haven't spent hours on it. I went my path, I'm happy for the path I went, but I think people wonder like do I have this thing that supposedly buds selects for and if I don't see how tough am I or not tough. Am I I think that we all can look at other people.
Physically. And I'm not somebody that does a lot of this. I know some people are really obsessed by this, like, oh, that person has like an eight pack with a like, veins on there. Like, I don't understand that that's not me, but I understand some people do that even to the point of pathology. But I think most people wonder like how resilient a my house and they can look to experiences that they've survived and say, well, I made it through where I'm resilient or not. But is there a way that like we can certainly that we can train it by doing hard things cold?
Ours is kind thing are like, small examples of those, but do you think it's an even an important question to ask? And if it is, you know, how does one go about thinking? Like we're like, how resilient am I should we put ourselves into situations of discomfort just to test that because I will say, I think a lot of people look to SEAL Teams and Team guys, in particular, as kind of a calibration point of like, okay. They know how to do hard things. They were
Elected for the ability to carry logs and get into cold water over and over and roll in the sand and go without sleep for a week or so like but that's probably not what they were doing when they were on deployment. It's clearly a pressure test for something else.
Yeah it's a strange strange thing. The basic underwater demolition SEAL training and
Quite frankly going and getting wet and cold and being miserable is is actually nothing compared to like being on deployment. And a good example that I use to compare this to is when I was on deployment in 2006, in ramadi there was as you were as you were driving off base to go
To the city to go into the city at conduct operations as you drove out of the compound on your right. Was this area, that was called the vehicle graveyard and the vehicle graveyard was exactly what it sounds like. It was probably 75 or 100 vehicles that were blown up destroyed burned.
In various Twisted conditions that had been dragged back through the city and put into this vehicle graveyard. And as you drove by that vehicle graveyard, you know, without question that every one of those
Twisted Vehicles represented. One two, three, four, five, American casualties wounded horribly wounded killed.
And there you are in a vehicle about to roll out into that City.
Where, what you're looking at can easily be you in the next three minutes and you're going to do that today, you can do that tomorrow. You can do that the next day and the day after that. And the day after that,
That compared to. And by the way this isn't just seals that are doing that. This is Marine. So this is the army guys that are over there. This is what everyone is doing and they do it.
They do it. You know I talked about Mark Lee who's a one of my guys first seal killed in Iraq and he was the lead turret gunner in the lead Humvee.
and,
Like in Vietnam, if you were the point man, in Vietnam, if you want to like an infantry Patrol, you an appointment in Vietnam. You are at risk booby traps Ambush so they rotated you out. Well, you know enough to stay up there all the time. You do an hour up at the as Point man, they get someone else up there.
And that guy, the lead turret gunner
in the in a
Humvee column of four or five or six Vehicles view, hit an IED, that's the vehicle. It's going to hit it, right? If you could go into an ambush, that's the guy that's going to get hit the guy that's standing up in a 50 caliber turret. That's the guy that's gonna die.
And Mark was you know, he was a new guy so he's in that lead turret 50 cal and she never asked to get rotated out.
And he's a very like to say very he was extremely charismatic, funny gregarious comedian. And, you know, we got all kinds of stories about Mark but one of them, you know, we were in Vegas and we're all gambling and like I come down from my hotel room and like I see Mark across the across the he's playing Blackjack, you know, he sees me he goes, hey, sir, when are the new Cadillac's coming out? Like he's just
Lighten up everybody just having a fantastic time but I remember one night, you know, he's getting ready to roll out and if I wasn't going out with the platoons, I let go out, you know like see the guys off. Give my hand salute as they're leaving. And I'm like how you feeling tomorrow? How you doing, Mark? You're good to go and he's like feeling lucky sir, you know, like that was his attitude and he's a guy that's gonna drive by that vehicle graveyard.
Drive right on that City and he's going to do it the next day and the day after that, and the day after that. So
And, like I said, that's what the army guys are doing. That's what the Marine Corps guys are doing. They're doing it. And so, as much as the mythology around basic SEAL training goes to me that's that, that that experience in combat, and what guys do is infinitely harder and infinitely, more important.
Now, all that being said, basic SEAL training is a is, is the, is it very strange laboratory for human beings? It is a very strange laboratory for human beings and it's a
it's
It's kind of crazy the way it works. It's very, it's obviously extremely difficult but there's no, like you I wouldn't put money, you could put odds on somebody making it through, you know, like, hey, that guy seems like it's gonna be good to go, but I wouldn't put a bunch of money on it, right? And I wouldn't take like a hundred percent. I would never take 100% bad on anybody because there's no one that's 100 going to make it through that training. And there's, there's just random, you know, some people say it's well it's cause you're why there's people that make it through.
SEAL training because their ex-girlfriend said they couldn't make it. There are some other guy that makes it through because they promised God that they would make it, there's some other guy that made it through because, you know, their dad said they could have it. There's like every one of these examples, you can come up with and it's good enough for some random dude, to make it through. And it doesn't matter what your pedigree is, doesn't matter where you're from. There's guys from Iowa, there's guys from Florida. There's guys from wherever,
That make it. And those guys from Iowa and those guys from Florida, this guy's from wherever the don't make it guys, from farms, guys from silver spoon in their mouth and it you just can't predict it. And I mean, it has to have something to do with the fact that how bad you actually want to do it.
That's it's a strange thing and I wouldn't you know I wouldn't try and you know if I was in the world if I didn't do that training I wouldn't be trying to figure out if I could make it or not cuz you don't know you don't know.
you're very strange thing and it's and it's so
Mythical most right now. Right? It's mythical. That how hard it is, and this is not too many people make it through, man,
15%? Yeah, Yeah. From all the folks that I've talked to, or they're gone through been instructors. There some, we both know seemed that at 15 percent number is unlikely to change. As long as they keep the process, the same. They just seems like about 15 percent people seem to have something in them that can
Perhaps grow during that training but that this it is being identified and selected for rather than somehow being built up across at least that phase of the early phases of training. And then, at some point, they build on that capacity and you know, this gets to this really somewhat controversial issue, frankly like our people wired differently and listen, I started off in neural development and I'll tell you that there are some Universal properties of neural development in all surviving humans like that.
You're going to breathe without having to think about it, your hearts going to be without having to think about it, but beyond that there's a lot of variation and natural levels of dopamine and serotonin. There's nature plays a powerful role and nurture. And what's interesting though is, we can't always predict from parents. What nature is going to do. Recently, we had someone on the podcast, I'm excited for you to listen to it if perhaps you will if I send it to you as a guy who talks about inheritable acquired traits, you don't expect that because you work out that your
Grandkids will be more muscular and have better endurance but there's actually some evidence that that may be the case and you go. Well, how could that be? We got two kinds of cells in your body. It turns out you have what are called somatic cells, which are all of them, leave The Germ cells, which are your sperm, and your wife's eggs,
Well, why wouldn't the DNA of the sperm cells in the egg cells? Be modifiable by experience if all the other cells are and it turns out there's some evidence that maybe it's not the DNA but that the RNA are think about that that means that weather and we known this that people that have been in a famine. Several Generations later their implications for blood sugar regulation in their great grand kids. So the idea that experience an acquired traits can change us is actually has some validity and you know and it and this gets into really
Things could be we do. This is like the giraffe that had to, like, crane its neck and then gave birth to longer annexure halves. And it's like, well, not exactly but also not entirely untrue either. So, I love the idea that there are inherited traits, and that there are that nature and nurture play a role, but that hard work. May actually transmitted across Generations.
Yeah, there's in Seal training. You know, you have kids that come through that they called legacies, which means that they have a dad, I think it Dad, brother, whatever.
Ever and they do have a better chance of making it, but it's not a guaranteed chance at all. And, you know, my personal opinion is like, I think a legacy kid would have a better chance of making it, just due to the Thanksgiving dinner. That you're gonna have to go through for the rest of your life with your family. If you don't ya. If you're even invited you which you might be on your own. But yeah, that's so there's maybe there's something to that as well but I think that's just more
The the pressure that someone must feel like, hey there's no way I'm going to be allowed back in my home, if I don't make it through this training. So I'm gonna have to just go ahead and suck it up but not everyone makes it and it's a bummer. And when that when that does
occur well for people who are not thinking about going through SEAL training or who missed the opportunity or who are not interested in that for whatever reason, do you think there's value to doing things each day, that sock a little
B or from time to time doing something that's you know puts one into a state of deliberate
discomfort on a percent. Yeah, I mean 100%, I mean, even in order to improve yourself, you got to you got to impose some discipline yourself, right? If you want to get stronger, you've got to do things that require strength. If you want to be tougher, you gotta do things that require you to be tougher. I think that's pretty
straightforward. Does that mean doing things that are not pleasurable? So for instance, you know, I've done some long podcasts.
And a few weeks ago, I did a series. We were doing a series of Andy Galpin all about exercise and exercise science. And we did six podcast in that week. The most I've ever done, which may doing 45 the next week, not so bad, but I loved every second of it, and I loved every second of podcasting and so it didn't suck. But it builds up a greater capacity, I guess I'm asking specifically about things that really feel like a splinter. Is there any value to that? Because I have to say, there are some people. I know some of them are former team.
Our team guys, because you don't say former team has it. They were out there out of the team's now, but their team guys forever, who seem to not be rattled by little things. Those guys in particular, they don't seem to be rattled by little things and then I know people that, you know, they get the wrong size, coffee to coffee shop, and they dissolve into a puddle of tears, right? So there does seem to be something to this whole like mental resilience thing, and flexibility thing, and I try and do something that's uncomfortable.
To me about once a week, something I really don't like, it doesn't matter what that is. But I try and do something that's kind of like unpleasant or do something in a way that's unpleasant. I guess the example will be getting into the cold water. The first thing in the morning and making that decision from under the blankets is a rough one for me. But then it gets easier. And then you wondered, is it still serving the purpose that it's building me up? So should people seek truly like bad.
Science has provided that they're done in a safe way.
Yeah, yeah. My
I think that you're gonna just like you would develop your legs by doing squats and you would develop your back by doing pull-ups. I think you would develop your resiliency by doing repetitions of things that require you to be tougher that actually suck.
Okay good. So, and the reason I ask this is because I think a lot of people think, well, I work out every day, but I but then you probe them a little bit. They're like, but I love exercise and then, well then that doesn't quite qualify as something that makes you tougher.
They think, oh, the last reps of a Setter really tough but if you love hitting failure on a set because that's kind of what I seek in the gym. I love that aspect of the training that's actually where I know, I'm getting better. It no longer serves as resilience training at more. Just serves as training in case I think that the point is clear and I appreciate your answer. I have to ask about something, you get, this is going to seem like a total Divergence, but it's not, which is animals. Because first of all, there are Love of Mine in terms of understanding the animals.
Kingdom and placing humans into the animal kingdom. Second of all, I know you're a hunter and also I know you own dogs. And the question I have is, do you ever look at people or did you ever work in teams of guys when you were on active duty? Can see that the difference is? You know, you mentioned before this person is really good at problem solving this person's a little bit more creative you ever wonder whether or not people of embody different kind of animal archetypes,
There's I
do well that thing where people say that dogs are owners. Look like their dogs. Dogs look like their owners. I think that's. I've seen all kinds of exam. Then you can go on the internet and find a bunch of examples of dogs that look like their owners and owners that look like their dogs. So I think that's true and I think, you know, by my dogs are awesome and
don't tell me that you're doing. What kind of dog is it?
My dog is a German Shepherd. His name is Odin and he's an awesome dog, you know? Like
And he's got a personality but it easy got an interesting personality. So like he doesn't like to like cuddle, right? Like my kids will be like, oh, he doesn't like to cuddle. No. Even you know, when we go to bed at night, he goes to four feet away from the foot of my bed.
Even if I was like, Hey, jump up, you have told him, jump up in here, you know, we want to pet you, he'll jump up in there and he just like kind of goes in that low crouched position and then sort of Waits until I say free dog. And then he goes back down, he goes for feet away from the book for the bed and sit sir, because he's that's his that's his personality is to protect and said, security and do his job and and that's what he's like. And so, you know, you've got other dogs that are, you know, you
They did, they're not good. They're two totally different mindset. So, yeah, dogs have definite personalities and and look, I also have it. It's not all genetic. So two of my friends got dogs, that were brothers. What are they called? Dogo
Argentino. So you know, the dough goes. Yeah, those are hard to get in the u.s. they're not. They might not even be legal in the United States. So don't tell me who these people are not that I care. But I want to tell you what they
are. Yeah.
But these two guys, and those two guys had different personalities. Well, one guy is a very happy-go-lucky likes to smoke. Pot likes to hang out. Very just a chill kind of playful guy. The other guy's not. He's the opposite in every category so and they both got these dogs and you fast forward fast forward. Like a year, the dog that was owned by the playful guy. His dog was just a
Big puppy licking at you know, just wagging the tail. The other dog you had to keep it in a cage or it would murder everything in sight. And these dogs were brothers from the same litter and they were completely opposite. And so I think it has more a lot more to do with, with nurture than it does, to do with nature. But that being said, you know, when you look at
When you look at Mal's, I mean Mal's have a personality that is very distinct compared to a German Shepherd. Now look, there's outlying Mal's, there's outlying German Shepherds, there's outlying you know you name whatever kind of golden retriever whatever dog is known for being more playful like you you get around them out Mal's our mouths our Mouse and they're that way if you've been around miles before.
Hmm. Oh the Belgian Malinois. Yeah, a few of them that are my neighbor has one and that thing
Is not terribly friendly but it's a security dog. So I don't expect it to be, it's a yeah, they're there. I know that they use them for work and the teams and I've heard that you have to keep a close eye on your relationship with them. Because if you get lacks about it, they'll bite. You. Does that true? The first
time I saw one we were doing like a drill with using dogs for the first time in the one of the Team guide Dog Handlers came out and so we hit this target building and you know they kind of pre briefed us
Hey, you get this target building and this guy is going to be a runner squirter. And and so the we pull up in the Humvees assault team jumps out I'm kind of staying external kind of kind of want to see what's going to happen. So this quarter goes running off and the dog handler like whatever tracks his dog on this guy and then releases the gives them whatever commands, you know, whatever the commands are that thing is like totally Prime.
Like and unlike anything you've ever seen in your life, it is just primed, it's tracking that guy. He hits that release on that leash and that thing takes off at 1,000 miles an hour. It jumps like I'm not kidding 15 feet, maybe 10, feet in the air away. And just Chomps. On to this, dude, the dude goes down. It was freaking awesome. I've
seen some videos of those Malinois as I guess. I didn't forgive me because before I didn't know you're referring to but Mal's met.
Noise those jars like running up trees jumping over the little Rivers as yeah, it's crazy. Incredibly powerful animals. Yeah, well the idea that people, you know, that they mimic their owners has me a little concerned because my last dog had to put him down as my. Bulldog Costello is a Bulldog Mastiff. I got him because I went to pick out a puppy basically, and there were eight of these Bulldogs, all of them were running around and then there's one in the background just eating out of all over their bowls and I was like, I want that one, you know, big Bulldog, biggest one in the litter leave.
Easiest creature, not just dog with laziest creature that ever existed. But if you need to activate he would he was just very efficient with his energy and you know, I don't think I have a bulldog personality and that's why I got them to kind of balance me out. You know, never retrieved never did anything stole and destroyed every toy every dog park in San Diego, who's kind of famous there. You know, I had to bring five dollar bills to pay people for all the balls and things he would destroy. So anyway, my apologies to all the dog owners, not really. I'm
Miss him. Did you train your dog or did someone else in the house I did? Was he trained to be a security dog or a kind of family dog or it kind of a mixture? Yep. Yeah I
mean the true working dogs unless you unless you have the time and effort to put into them or you buy them that way you don't like you don't want one of those dogs that I was just describing in your house. They're not for a house unless there's like, there's that level. My dogs, not that level. He's awesome.
Did you apply some of the same principles that you use in leadership of humans with your dog?
Yeah, there are a lot of similar principles, but there's also, you know, there's there's some differences. There's like they're pack animals, right? And they respond to, you know, the the pack leader is funny. You know my my dog obeys me as if it's the command of God and my wife, he's kind of like maybe I'll do what you say.
So they pick up on that kind of stuff. Dogs are very intuitive. I
love this idea that I was told early on that, they can feel your emotions. I think they actually can sense how we feel, not just by the intonation of our voice, but I hope someday someone will figure out in a non-invasive way because I don't like the idea of people doing experiments on dogs and invasive way kind of like what they're picking up on. Like for instance, we know that sharks are paying attention to the amount of activity. In the lateral line of fish. A lot fish have these these stretches of neurons they call the
A line that allowed them to school and know, the distance to different things and be able to steer around Coral, they feel proximity to be kind of like, if you're turning according to, and they can even recognize specific lateral line signatures so be like you and Mark Lee walking together through the dark. But maybe people sit around here, like, you don't have to look at that's Mark, you kind of learn him into like a fish. Can do that. Sharks can sense, whether or not the lateral line is is it's a vibrant but firing at a particular frequency to know though that fish
Is like a little bit slower than the rest I mean, you know, hunting animals just they develop these incredible senses and I think humans have some of these kind of senses and more. Rudimentary way we're just not forced to use them. Unless, of course, you know, you are become a hunter of animals or a hunter of humans and you tap into these neural circuits that are very primitive and hardwired and everybody. But of course, they're honed in Warriors where I could spiral off into animal biology in ways that
He would take us 26 hours. I don't want to do that. I'm almost hesitant to ask this question but I'm going to do it anyway.
Many times online. You are asked whether or not you will run for office. And I want to say that I think it's a true compliment. I don't think people are asking just to kind of entertain themselves. I think that this country certainly in a lot of the world is desperate for certain kinds of leaders, and people that have experience in high risk, High consequence chaotic situations and have shown prowess at leadership in multiple domains and you are certainly one of those.
Individuals. And so they asked for that reason, among others. And I've heard you give your answer, you can repeat it again here but as a more broad theme that I think people are interested in.
Do you think it's an important criteria or it would be great to see people in positions of leadership who've had wartime experience? And you think that some of the shifts that we've seen in terms of patterns of leadership over the last, let's just make it real broad. So that this isn't a related to any particular person or stretch of history. But over the last, let's just say, 25 years. Reflect the fact that we haven't seen a lot of that at least at the top tiers of leadership.
Yeah, I think it'd be excellent. If people, you know, if the president had military experience for sure, I think that then they understand the, with the way the military works better, they understand that each de civilians, that control the military, because a lot of times, people are civilians. Don't understand that the civilians control the military, and I think that you do get to appreciate
What war actually is and what the costs are. I think that, you know, I've seen in the same vein of people asking me to run for political office. I've heard, you know, seen comments saying, oh that's what we need, another warm-up, a warmonger in in office and responded a few of those. I think there's any if there's any group of people that don't want war it's people that have seen it people that understand what the what the sacrifice.
Isis are, and I think that, I think that being in the military,
People understand that better. So, yeah, I think it'd be a great qualification. I don't think it's mandatory. I mean, clearly it's not, we've had a bunch of presidents that have never served anything, really? We've had a bunch of presents that have never served anything about themselves. So, yeah. Hopefully, we'll get some more people that have some experience in the military. Some combat experience would be especially nice and that would be good in my opinion.
Well, I'm certainly not one to tell people what to do and I'm certainly not going to tell you what to do. But should you ever choose to run? I would certainly be very enthusiastic about that and, and I will just say that with that stated. I hope people do hear what you just said. I share that sentiment. People who have led others besides themselves. I think is the key statement there.
Yeah, I look, I just I friends at our politicians and I really appreciate what they're doing and
And it looks miserable to me, I don't like, I don't like, what is good for them. I'm happy that they're in there, trying to make a difference. And I guess this is me being selfish of me. Say, look that I don't think I could stomach that. And I also think that, you know, right now, I'm, you know, I'm trying to help out like, for instance, you know, we have obviously got the leadership Consulting and Echelon front, we're trying to help businesses grow. I've got origin USA, we're bringing manufacturing back.
America. We've got 100 and 400 and 450 employees right now that are here in America working and growing that business, obviously, the supplements are so everything that I'm doing here right now is to try and move the needle with with America bringing manufacturing back, helping the economy as much as I can, right now. So, that's that's kind of what I'm doing right now and and, you know, my standard answer which you alluded to is if things got bad enough.
Enough.
You know, then I would I would do what I had to do but I don't think people appreciate my level of bad. I'm talking real bad. So it's not there yet and hopefully, it never will get there. I'd rather Surf and hang out with my friends and and hang out with my family, then do that. And hopefully America can can find some level of balance, you know, I think that's the problem that we're having right now. And
All of these things that you talked about. But specifically, the things you talk about is social, media is not very good for political balance. It's actually horrible for political balance and a lot of it has to do with just the way that those conversations are had a lot of it has to do with the ego as well, because I don't ever want to admit that I'm wrong about anything. And if you, if I can find something that, I think you might be wrong about. It's so satisfying to my ego, to just call you out on that thing and attack you. And I think
it's what a lot of people are doing right now. Now, that being said also, I also usually say this, as well. I travel around the country all the time. I work with companies of all sizes, work with people in every different industry. And they're not, they're not sitting around arguing with each other about what the political scenery, they're talking about, hey, how can we grow a business? How can we take care of our workers? How can we take care of our clients? How can we take our customer? That's what people are focused on and when you jump on social media, you can get sucked into the
Lyrical seen very easily. And that being said, also, we do have to pay attention because you, you know, we as citizens have to make sure that that America stays on the on the correct path within the guardrails of what this country is based on. So we do have to pay attention but I will be doing my part as a civilian until there's total Mayhem and chaos.
Us in the streets then I'll probably just be a benevolent dictator that takes over should be an interesting one. But hey, you would be you would be
the man to lead under any conditions but thank you for stating your threshold certainly you've earned the right to make. Whatever decision is that you feel is right for you. And I want to say that I agree. I feel like we are a country that still includes a ton of generators and a ton of projectors that are interested in projecting the good and growing the good. I do believe both those phenotypes are important.
I also want to just say thank you for being a generator of so much useful knowledge. You know in science we have a saying which is you know, it's somebody is an N of 1. This is a rare thing to hear about oneself or to hear about somebody because what it means is that somebody is in a category in which pretty much everything that they do and they say matters and serves a purpose which is a useful and important building purpose. And I will look at you and tell you that you are an end of one. You certainly would
That criteria under any conditions and it's evident in the many companies that you're running in the leadership that you're doing and also in your online presence. I mean, that's how I initially came to learn about you. I'm now fortunate to have two lengthy conversations with you in a few interspersed as well. And and I'm think of myself as a reasonable to perhaps good Observer of like how people behave in different domains. And every time you post or every time you speak or every time you, do you go on a podcast or
Hosts a podcast. It's clear that not only are you prepared and not only you approaching it with a spirit of seriousness, it deserves but sometimes also lightness that it deserves but there's always an element of give and that you're trying to encourage people to do better for themselves. So as somebody who has greatly benefited from the knowledge that you've put out there, from the very first, Tim Ferriss and Joe Rogan episodes to your own podcast. I want to extend a personal. Thanks, I also want to extend. Great. Thanks for coming on here today, talking to a
Scientist whose but who also happens to be a fellow punk rocker because that Spirit and the heart that's behind it. You know, I think some people think it's all about noise and Chaos. It's actually about being really true to yourself. That's how I think about the punk rock spirit is really about being true to yourself and realizing the thing that you like, while it might be quite different is actually, if that's you, you have to live in that in that vein and stick with it. Certainly served me. Well and it sounds like it served you well, but mostly I just want to extend an enormous. Thank you. You know, as a civilian, thank you for the
Worth you did in the military, but also teaching people about the military, I think a lot of people don't realize what it's about at any level and learning about your experience there. And what you've observed bringing other people to experience is from the military of more broadly. He's super important and sharing this and being able to entertain some of my scientific riff. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Well I appreciate it. I can it's kind of weird. You say, all these nice things to me I definitely don't deserve them kind of a regular dude. Yet that just kind of showed up I guess at the right time and and told some stories about some guys that were true heroes and just trying to share my perspective, but it's not just my perspective. You know, I'm talking about stories that I lived but there's plenty of people that have done way more than I've ever done and, and
Twice infinitely more than I ever sacrificed. So I'm thankful for being here. I know that you put all kinds of information than I the same back at you. You know, I have greatly benefited from the information that you put out and so I thank you as well and appreciate coming on here and appreciate you spreading the word about how people can be better yourself. So, thanks for having me. I appreciate it, man.
Appreciate you, and appreciate this time and let's do it again.
Then check, thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Jocko willing. I hope you learned as much as I did in terms of actionable knowledge to use in our everyday lives. If you'd like to learn more about Jaco's work and the various things he's involved in, please check out the Jocko podcast. Please also check out the various links in the show notes captions to Jocko's. Excellent books on leadership both for adults and for kids and check out some of the other links that relate to some of his other business ventures, if you're learning from and, or enjoying this,
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