Modern Wisdom - #502 - Jocko Willink - Creating An Unbreakable Mindset

Episode Date: July 21, 2022

Jocko Willink is a retired United States Navy officer in SEAL Team 3, an author and a podcaster. Finding discipline in the modern world is hard. A hyper convenient existence rarely encourages radical responsibility or extreme ownership. Thankfully Jocko has spent an entire life learning how to love discomfort, and also teaching others how to love it too. If discipline equals freedom then Jocko must be one of the freest men on the planet. Expect to learn what Jocko thinks about the Detroit self-defence guy, why discipline always beats motivation, the similarities between elite special forces and elite BJJ athletes, Jocko's opinion on Jordan Peterson, how to get over an ex, whether he regrets being famous after working in the shadows for so long, how he used a Jim Carrey impression to chat up his wife, whether he wants to try psychedelics and much more... Sponsors: Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and Free Shipping from Athletic Greens at https://athleticgreens.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 30% discount on your at-home testosterone test at https://trylgc.com/modernwisdom (use code: MODERN30) Get 10% discount on your first month from BetterHelp at https://betterhelp.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Check out Jocko's website - https://jocko.com/ Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello everybody, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Jocco Willink, he's a retired United States Navy officer in SEAL Team 3, an author and a podcaster. Finding discipline in the modern world is hard, a hyper-convenient existence rarely encourages radical responsibility or extreme ownership. Thankfully, Jocco has spent an entire life learning how to love discomfort and also teaching others how to love it too. If discipline equals freedom, then Jocco must be one of the freest men on the planet. Expect to learn what Jocco thinks about the Detroit Self-Defense Guy. Why discipline always beat to motivation? The similarities between elite special forces and elite Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu

athletes. Jocco's opinion on Jordan Peterson, how to get over an X, whether he regrets being famous after working in the shadows for so long, how he used a Jim Carey impression to chat up his wife, whether he wants to try psychedelics, and much more. This was a lot of fun to record. I flew out to San Diego with the entire production team, and it's just so special doing these big episodes with people like Jocco or Hubertman or Jordan Peterson or whatever. It's such a dream to be able to travel around and create something that I genuinely think is

special. So I really, really hope that you enjoy this episode. It took a lot of effort, a lot of planning and a lot of investment as well to get it to look and sound the way that I wanted it to and They guys just nailed it. So sit back and enjoy this one and if you're new here hit the subscribe button There are some even bigger guests coming later this year, and you're not gonna want to miss them But now ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Jocka Willink. Jocka Willink, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, I appreciate it. I'm going to be a little bit more of a little bit more of a little bit more of a little bit more of a little bit more of a little bit more of a little bit more of a little bit more of a little bit more of a

little bit more of a little bit more of a little bit more of a little bit more of a little bit more of a little bit more of a little bit more of a little bit more of a little bit more of a little bit more of a little bit more of a little bit more of a little bit more of a little bit more of a little bit more of a little bit more of a

little bit more of a little bit more of a little bit more of a little bit more of a little bit more of a little bit more of a little bit more of a little bit more of a little bit more of a little bit more of a little bit more of a little bit more of a little bit more of a little bit more of a little bit more of a little bit more of a

little bit more of a little bit more of a little bit more of a little bit more of a little bit more of a little bit more of a little bit more of a little bit more of a little bit more of a little bit more of a little bit more of a little bit more of a little bit more of a little bit more of a little bit more of a little bit more of a little bit more of a little bit more of a little bit more of a little bit more of a little bit I think he flew in from Oregon where he is, where he lives, but we did, we did meet up there. And, but I did fly up there with Chris Pratt and Jack Carr and some of the other folks from the terminal list, which is a TV show that Chris Pratt is in, that Jack Carr wrote the book, that the show is based on. And we went up there, watched the fights. It was a very cool night, yeah, it was fun. What time did you get up the next day?

I got up, I don't know, but Cam was giving me a hard time. He says, what, you know, what are you, are you gonna get up tomorrow morning? And I said, I'm not even gonna get home until three in the morning. And that's right, that's when I got home. I got home at three o'clock in the morning. I think I got up around maybe eight, eight,

30, something like that. The fact that you don't do the 4.30 AM thing after a night out makes me feel at least a little bit more mortal. If it's going to be less than four hours of sleep, then I'll make some kind of adjustment. You'll just push it the next day. Yeah. What was it like to see the UFC live if you've seen that before? I've been to so many UFC's, I don't know how many UFC's I've been to, but I've been to a lot.

I spent, when I was younger, I spent a lot of time coaching and training fighters, so I cornered a bunch of fighters in the UFC, and so I've been to, I don't even know how many UFC's I've been to, but I haven't been in a long time. I haven't been in probably three, four years. So it was cool to go and see one again, and get back up there.

UFC, seeing the UFC live is awesome. And look, you know, people will say, and even I'll say this too, it's great to sit at home and, you know, get all the different angles and hear the commentary. That's cool. There's a benefit to that, but there is a lot of hype and a lot of energy

that's in the room or in the stadium when it's going on. And so being there live definitely is worth doing occasionally to make sure you don't forget what that's all about. How do you handle the next day now if you've had a few drinks the night before? I actually don't drink. So, you know, there's really no factor for me. You know, I drank more than my fair share

when I was in the military. And then when I retired from the military and I kinda just over time, over time, I just kinda wasn't drinking anymore. Now I just don't really drink anymore. There's not much in it for me. You know, I'm an old man with, I'm married with kids and businesses

and all this other stuff going on. So I'm not going to get much out of, out of drinking anymore. And a big price to pay the next day as well if you did decide to do it maybe. I guess I, sure, I guess that that might be some of it, but there's just, I just don't, I'm not going to anything out of it. So two of the biggest elements in your life have been your military training and your martial arts training. What would you say are the commonalities between the best BJJ athletes and the best special forces operators that you've worked with? There's probably the biggest commonality between the two is some kind of strange contrast between being extremely disciplined and being extremely creative.

So clearly, if you're going to get good at Jiu-Jitsu, you've got to be disciplined enough to train all the time, same thing with being in the military. If you're going to be a good operator, you have to have the discipline to push yourself in training. But you can't be a person that lean so hard towards a disciplined, structured life that you don't have any creativity because both in Jiu-Jitsu and on the battlefield, you want to be creative and figure out creative solutions and things that people have in thought of and things that the enemy is not going to think of or that your opponent's

not going to think of. So you've got to find that person who has a good balance between discipline and kind of a wild freedom creativity that they can make adjustments. It's interesting to think that more focus or more efficiency isn't always the solution to everything. So the analogy I'd use is, if you think about an artist's creative studio where they need their creativity,

it's not orderly. There's half coffees and easels and sketches and paint and all sorts of stuff all over it. What does that engender? What's that environment creating for them? But then when they need to go and file their taxes, trying to file their taxes in that same room is probably not a good idea. And I guess that flip-flop between often on, right, between focus and play, it seems like a very interesting thing to think about, especially in a military context. What does that mean when you're talking about a special force whose operator being creative? You know, there's a certain level of inside the military in general is if you're going to, you have to be a person that kind of follows the rules and stays within standards and that's great and you're going to, you're going to be a good, solid soldier if that's what you are. But if you have a mindset that's so highly disciplined,

so highly structured, like I just said, then you're not gonna think creatively when there's a problem that needs to be solved. So you wanna have people that don't mind the discipline and can actually access the discipline in a way that they can utilize it, but you don't want people to be trapped by discipline. And it's the same thing in Jiu-Jitsu. If you have someone that only knows how to do a certain move and they can't think creatively about other ways

to employ that, it's not that they're not going to be good because they are going to be good, but they're going to reach limitations. And you know, one of the interesting things in the SEAL teams is, we didn't have, especially when I was coming up, we didn't have any doctrine whatsoever. There was no written doctrine of any kind. So everything that you learned was word of mouth. You learned from the guys that went before you.

And that meant if the guys that went before you didn't really know what they were doing, you're probably learning a bad way. And if you didn't think objectively about it, then you might follow someone down a path that doesn't make any sense. So you ended up with a bunch of guys in the SEAL teams that were pretty open-minded

and they could kind of look at problems and figure out how to solve them. In the Army and the Marine Corps, they have doctrine for just about everything. This is how you do a raid. This is how you conduct an ambush. They had written doctrine for this. So if you didn't know how, you could just look at a book, which is actually a huge benefit

for them. Because if I'm a new platoon commander, I don't know how to do an ambush, I can just look at this book and I can learn how to do it. And so there's some huge benefits to not too to having a very disciplined doctrine that you can follow. But that's one of the odd advantages of the SEAL teams is that since we didn't have any doctrine, we had to be a little bit more free thinking, and that made us a little bit more adaptive in some situations.

So it's just like anything else, your strength can be your weakness, your weakness can be your strength, and you have to be aware. And if you're aware that it's a strength, and if you're aware that it can also be a weakness, and if you're aware that it's a weakness, and you're aware that it can also be a strength, then you can probably optimize the way that you're going to think, which is pretty beneficial. Do you think that can be trained, that creativity? Yeah, I think creativity can be trained. Just like any other Yeah, I think creativity can be trained. Just like any other natural trait,

some people are going to have more propensity to be creative than someone else, and some people are more rigid than other people in the way they think. And you can take someone that's more rigid and you can make them more creative, but everyone's gonna have some kind of a limitation. And some people might have a pretty,

pretty subdued limitation of how creative they're gonna get. And some people might have a pretty, pretty, pretty subdued limitation of how creative they're going to get. And some people can really be trained to get a lot better at that. Where did you fall on that spectrum? I would say I fell, I would say I fell pretty hard in both directions. So I was, you know know a disciplined person that believed in instruction. I liked structure and at the same time you know I was I would definitely think of things in a different way. I was a very rebellious kid and I

think rebellion could be somehow tied to creativity and looking at things and saying hey that doesn't make sense to me. So I'd say that I had, I had say it was pretty, a pretty strong degree of both of those things. And that's what made me who I am. Well, especially the music that you listen to as well growing up, right? I don't think almost all of the kids that I know that grow up listening to metal or hardcore, they've, you can't listen to that and not have a rebellious streak in you. Yeah, you definitely can't listen to that and not have a rebellious streak in you. And that did kind of drive my way of thinking a lot when I was growing up.

And not only did drive my way of thinking, I think I found that kind of music because that's the way I was sort of engineered in the first place. So yeah. Who are you listening to when you grow? Bad brains, black flag, agnostic front, crow mags, black Sabbath is my favorite band of all time. Yeah, those kind of bands. A lot of your work is, it's focused on encouraging people to take ownership and responsibility

for things. One of the things that I've been thinking about a lot recently is whether it's possible to take too much responsibility or too much ownership where you start to believe that you're at fault or you're accountable for things and blame yourself too frequently. Blame yourself too much. You think that's possible? There's a way that it can happen Usually from a leadership perspective when people ask me this question Hey, can't is it possible to take too much ownership the answer is yes, and that is if I'm in charge and you're working for me and

I take so much ownership over a mission or over a project that you don't feel like you have any input at all, then I've taken too much ownership. As far as as like as an individual person, there's going to be things in your life that you don't have control over. And you know, one of the one of the early questions that I got asked about this, You know, like for instance, someone gets a terrible disease and, you know, or their kids gets a terrible disease. A random disease that's, through no fault of anyone, the kid gets sick or the person gets sick. And no, there's nothing you can do about that.

What you can take ownership of those, how you respond to that situation. And so that's what you have to do. There's things that you can control. There's things you can't control. Now I will tell you that human beings can control a lot more than they think they can. And oftentimes it's pretty easy just to say,

oh, that's not me, that's not on me. And I think that's the whole genesis of the idea of extreme ownership is most of the time or much of the time. People say that's not my fault. there's nothing I can do about that, and more often than people think, there is something you can do about it. And it is your fault. I find it interesting to think about, it's not your fault, but it is your responsibility as well, and how that sits in amongst this. My concern with it is, don't get me wrong, I think that right now,

the vast majority of people need to take more responsibility. I think that it is a great counter to a victim mindset. I think that it helps people with agency and sovereignty. I can see elements in my life, though, of times when I've blamed myself for things, which I'm in no way even remotely associated with. So for instance, let's say that I'm doing a podcast with someone, or I'm doing a live event, right? I'm facilitating some discussion.

And I ask a question and the guest fluffed the response, like gives a poor response. A lot of the time, the first place that I would go is that was on me somehow I should have asked a better question. And even if I'd asked the absolute perfect question, and you could roll that forward into a relationship, you know, that you're in a relationship with a bad partner or you, something occurs, I just, I'm trying to find that line of how people can balance it so that they don't end up putting so much pressure and weight on

them that it crushes them. Yeah. Well, here's two examples of what you're talking about. You mentioned one relationship. Another one is just if you're working for me. So if you're working for me and you don't show up on time or you're not professional when you're conducting your briefs, I need to say something to you. And I need to take ownership of the fact that I haven't made it clear that hey, you need to show up on time and

hey, you need to be more professional and hey, you need to wear the right uniform or the dress, the part. I need to take ownership of that. And maybe if I do and I talk to you and we discuss why it's important and you say, I really didn't think about that and you change your ways and you get on board and you start showing up on time and start acting more professional. It's great. We solve the problem. There's also a chance that you're late again or you show up with booze on your breath or whatever and we're meeting with a client and I say, hey Chris, you can't do this. Look, I'm serious. You cannot act this way. This reflects bad on all of us. And maybe you, and I might even say, listen, if you keep this up, you're not even working anymore. I'm going to have to get rid

of you. You say, I love working with you. It's gonna be great. I won't do it again. And maybe that solves your problem. Or maybe you're late again, or you continue to act on professionally, and then I'm gonna get rid of you. I'm gonna say, hey, Chris, look, I talked to you.

I try to explain this to you. And at a certain point, this job isn't for you. So that can happen. And I have to take ownership of the fact that you are actually not capable of doing this job that I've asked you. So that's fine. Same thing you have in a relationship, right?

Look, if you're in a relationship with someone and you're bickering about where we're gonna go for dinner or you came home late from work and all you do is, well, I've been working all day. You should respect the fact that I've been working on it. That's actually on you. That's actually on you. And you can make adjustments to that.

Now, can you get to a point in relationship where the other person is not a good fit for you? And at some point, you say, you know what? I've made these adjustments. I've come home, you know, on time. I've texted you when I was going to be late. And these other things are coming up. And you say, you know what, I don't think this is working.

And I don't think this is a good relationship. So, at a certain point, you say, okay, I've made the adjustments that I can make and I have to take ownership of the fact that we're not a good match. So, yeah, there's plenty of times where taking ownership means actually solving the problem, not continuing to pour the problem down your neck every night, because that's not very helpful to anybody.

So you have to do a certain point, you have to make adjustments, and you have to move forward. There's a lot of similarities, I think, between your personal philosophy and Jordan Peterson's, and I've spoken to him a couple of times. What have you learned from him? Well, the most interesting thing that I learned from Jordan Peterson, and I mentioned this the first time he came on my podcast, was that, you know, he's a trained academic that studied this stuff his whole life, and we came to a lot of the same conclusions about things,

and I just came to those conclusions through living, and the experiences that I had and he came to them through studying this stuff in a very rigorous way. And the cool thing is luckily for me, I had written books that sort of predated. I got that first. I got that first.

It wasn't that I got there first, but I mean, these were the thoughts that I had. I mean, Discipline Quests Freedom. That book came out, I think, before Jordan Peterson was on the scene, the X the book, Extreme Ownership, which is about taking personal responsibility, what's about taking responsibility, and you can definitely apply it to personal responsibility.

So luckily for me, those books kind of predated Jordan Peterson coming onto the scene and doing everything that he did, but again, it's not like I created any of but again, it's not like I created any of those things. It's not like I created it before he created it and it's not like he created it before other philosophers had figured these things out. So I'd say the most interesting thing about Jordan Peterson that I found, and I think it

was pretty interesting to him too, was the fact that we both had kind of come to these same conclusions and we had lived very different lives. I mean, I'm sure there's more disparate lives that we could have lived, but they're pretty different lives. And that's, that was a very interesting thing. And it made me feel like, well, it made me feel good about the fact that the things that I had figured out were in line with things that he had figured out. And that means maybe there's

a little bit more strength in universality to these things that I believed, which felt pretty good. It's nice to know or to think that something that's been proven in the field of battle or on the field of play is backed up in academia, right? That someone can go through the annals of philosophy history and come to a similar conclusion as you. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, the stuff that I say is in the Bible, the stuff that I say is in stoicism. And Jordan Peterson says the stuff that I say, or I say the stuff that he says again, I'm not trying to compete with Jordan Peterson on any level, especially some kind of an intellectual level, but we have similar thoughts about things and that predated either one of us knowing who each other were. So I think that's pretty cool.

Why do you think people are drawn to advice that's telling them to do hard things? Kind of seems counterintuitive. Why do I think people are drawn to advice telling them to do hard things? Because I think any person, any human realizes that if you want some kind of a good outcome, you're going to have to work hard for it. And if you don't work hard for something, you're not going to get an outcome. That's really worth much. Well, that is the thing that separates the achievements on the other side of it, right?

If it was easy, everyone would do it. If it was easy, everyone would achieve it. So this is one of the things that I try and rely on when training's been getting hard, so I ruptured my Achies a couple of years ago. That sucked. I wouldn't advise it as an injury generally. Yeah, and it's like a random,

a lot of times people just do it, you know, getting out of their car or something. It was playing cricket. Yeah, the most British way to snap an Achilles. That's a very British way to snap your Achilles for sure. Um, and during that, during the rehab for that,

it's pretty just uncomfortable. It's endless calf raises, right, which is not fun. And the discomfort that you feel and the fear of it, re-rupturing, which is the number one thing you don't have to have happen, the thing that I went back to in my mind was this is why I'm here. The discomfort that I was feeling, the effort, the pain, the sweat, thankfully this was during COVID, so it meant that if I had to do a workout

every single morning for half an hour on just my carbs, what else are you doing, right? There's a pandemic going on. This is why you're here, was the reminder, it's like look, this is the reason why the re-rupture rate is five to 10%, because people don't want to do this thing. People don't want to do the thing because it hurts, because it takes half an hour every

single day for nearly 12 months to full 12 month recovery. That's why. This is why you're here. And I think that you're right. I think that the selection is people deep down know that picking up heavy things, physically, psychologically, existentially, culturally is good for us. And I think that that's why it's attractive.

I agree. Another thing that I think is that... It's one of the reasons why people can become a little bit triggered. They can become a little bit uncomfortable when they see somebody else that's got a lot of discipline. Because I think deep down they know that if they had that thing, that that would fix a lot of the problems that they have in their life. Is this a dynamic that you've seen? I'm sure that's a bummer for someone to look at someone else that's working really hard and achieving some positive things. And they know that they're not maybe working as hard as they could be and they're not really achieving what they want to achieve.

I'm sure that's things a little bit. Another thing that Jordan said recently is that the problem with Twitter is that the price of being a prick has fallen to zero. I feel like you agree with that as well. Yeah, I guess I'd agree with that. If you're going to spend a bunch of time on Twitter, you're going to run into a bunch of people that don't like you, and they're going to say it, and there's nothing you can do about it.

And the ability for people's words and the consequences of those words to become detached as well is something that's only pretty recent. I mean, I guess you could have sent a mean telegram a hundred years ago. Yeah. I would recommend that you don't let random bots or people on Twitter bother you that much. That's my recommendation.

I would recommend you to. You know, the first time I kind of experienced that, it was when I was on, I was on Rogan for the first time and the YouTube video came out and I sat there with my oldest daughter who is probably maybe 14 or 15 at the time and I sat there and read these heinous comments about me and laughed. I mean, it was kind of, you know, some were pretty good.

It was kind of funny. So, yeah, I'm not, I'm not getting bothered by somebody that wants to talk smack about me for whatever on Twitter. And also there's, there's probably some truth to whatever they're saying, you know, they say I'm a big knuckle-dagger, yeah,'re saying, you know, they say I'm a big knuckle dragger. Yeah, probably right. You know, they say I'm an idiot. Yeah, there's definitely some of that. What else? D. Swamuch. I don't think I've ever heard you swam. I don't swear a ton. Um, and look, when I there's a there's a term we have in America. I don't know if you have this in England, but swear like a sailor meaning people in the Navy swear a lot and certainly when I was in the SEAL teams I probably swore every seventh fifth to seventh word that came out of my mouth

especially talking to a SEAL cartoon about something but no one I don't square a ton. I mean, if you listen to my podcast all the time, you'll see that when there's an appropriate time to square, then I will. But even it's interesting, you know, if you square all the time, it kind of loses its impact. And so when I do square on the podcast, people usually say, oh, he's, this is an important thing.

This is a, this is obviously very, very powerful emotion that he's feeling around because he just set a swear word. So yeah, but I don't care. It's swear, Ton, when I'm, and even when I was in the SEAL teams, I'd come home at night and I don't swear in front of my wife and I wouldn't swear in front of my kids. So I would just turn it off and that's that.

It's like when you hear Sam Harris swear, if you ever hear him do this, sprinkled very infrequently, but when it happens, you're okay. It's an attention getter. Yeah, I have a friend Daniel Sloss, comedian and Scottish, so that combined is like a multiplying force,

and I actually think that he probably uses more swear words than actual words. That salt-be-guy, it's kind of like that, but just throughout every single sentence. Deprogramming it, I think, is important. It's something that I've really tried to work on. Just being a working class lad from the UK is part and parcel of the language, perhaps, is being in the seals. Listening back, especially hearing yourself speak a lot, which you've done over the last

six, seven years or whatever I know there's something about it that I just I would rather save it for the times when I need it Yeah, and There is if you're doing something like where people are going to listen to it Sort of detached from the moment that you're living in, then it's different as well. So it doesn't come across the same. And you and I have a conversation over lunch talking about whatever, that's different. And you know, those words are a little bit more fitting in those situations.

Or if you're watching the UFC. Yeah, if you're watching the UFC. But yeah. Yeah, if you're watching the UFC, but yeah, yeah, look, I don't really, if people swear, it's not, it's not like a huge concern of mine. I don't really care that much, but maybe you could improve your vocabulary a little bit and use it. Not always rely on the same five swear words. Yeah.

But some people use them well and they're hilarious when they use them. Daniel uses his spectacularly. Yeah, I would say he's probably got a black belt in swearing. Right on. I want to revisit your good video for the people that haven't seen it. It's a two-minute-long edit that was released seven years ago on your YouTube channel and it's got like nearly 10 million plays or something now. And in it, you're encouraging people to respond to setbacks and things that don't go well by saying good, by leaning into the discomfort,

by seeing it as an opportunity. Was there anything you think that people misinterpreted about that video or about good generally as a concept? Look, if you take any idea and you take it to an extreme, then that idea is going to become bad. I mean, even the idea of extreme ownership, if you take it to an extreme where you're, like, as you pointed out earlier, you're blaming yourself because your daughter got a disease or you're blaming yourself because your husband is abusing you. Like, there's a point where you think anything goes too far.

And, you know, I mean, there's some pretty good memes about that on the internet. There's some good memes about that on the internet. Oh, crashed my car, my dog died. Good. I need a new car anyways. So yeah, take it to an extreme. It can be, it can become pretty silly or funny depending on how you take it. But for the most part, you're going to run into challenges in life.

And if you curl up into a ball and complain about it, that's not going to help you. And if you say, okay, cool, good. Here's some adjustments I can make to move forward. That's gonna be a better move than, than cowering. Is there anything that you wish that you'd added in? I don't know, I mean, I said it during one of my podcasts and my friend Echo

turned it into a video. So, so that's it. If I wanted to, I I mean, I said it during one of my podcasts and my friend Echo turned it into a video. So, so that's it. If I wanted to, I probably would have expanded on it or done something else. I don't know, do you tell me did I miss something? I don't think so. I mean, it's pithy and obviously, as you've said, it's extensive, not exhaustive as a solution. And this is Twitter and a nutshell that you have to sacrifice how explicit you're being for brevity, for being sufficiently succinct, that people can understand it and you can get it in in a one minute 55 so that people can actually watch it and click off or whatever. And people will then use the lack of detail to expand that out and say,

yeah, dog died in the car crash and good, right? You can see how that's easy to criticize. But I think overall, this is really great story actually. It was about Zeno of Sityam, the guy that founded stoicism. And often he was criticized that he was very abrupt when he would speak to people, when he was giving his, because he was around in a time of the sophist, right? And sophistry was all about these big, long, extravagant philosophical treaties, and they would use these super, super long words and stuff. And what he found was that people didn't like the fact

of how abrupt he was, didn't like that. And someone once criticized him for it and he said, yes, I am. Thank you. If I could, I would even shorten the syllables as well. And I like the idea of someone that uses previty in an effective way. And this sort of links in with something

I've been thinking about recently, which is to do with the outcomes that we get in life. So all of the concerns that we have, all of the sleepless nights and the neuroses and the overthinking and the confusion and the uncertainty in the self-doubt and all of that stuff, all combined together, I think, probably net us about maybe five or 10% better outcomes in life. It's my belief that most of the qualities that you have, your integrity, your virtue, your discipline, your hard work, your growth-mindedness, your humor, your resilience,

all of that are forces that are very, very difficult for you to slow down, and that once they've got started, it's incredibly hard for you to stop them. And what you're doing with all of the extra concern that comes over the top of that is just making your day-to-day experience of it a lot more miserable. And I've been thinking a lot about how can you... How can you... I'm off at it, right, the love of fate, the destiny that I have is the one that's going to come. I understand that I have control over it, I'm off at the right, the love of fate, the destiny that I have is the one that's going to come.

I understand that I have control over it. I understand that I have agency, that I have sovereignty, that I can impact my destiny. But also that all of the work and the effort that I put in previously is going to carry me through. And if I've been successful so far, that worrying about success going forward, whether or not it's going to occur, it doesn't seem super smart. And then relating that to good is that not only do you need to, or can you accept something and say that it is good, you can also have the sense of resiliency that you

know that you've got through something that's worse than this before. How did you get on last time? Did you face something that was difficult. You're still here. By virtue of the fact that you're listening to this, you're still here. And there's a part of that that makes me think about, good is an active philosophy, right? It's actively saying something happens. I'm going to lean into it. I'm going to be a forward motion, right? And then the backup that you seem to have behind that as well is, look at all of the things that I've dealt with before. Look at all of the effectiveness that I've come through with previously. I think that those two combined together are pretty powerful.

I agree. Speaking about, speaking about motivation and stuff as well, which is obviously kind of the other side of what you do. You know I am laughing, right? Why? Because you were telling the story about this guy who gave really brief answers, and then you talked for six minutes,

and I said, I agree. So it's just having fun. Good man. and I said, I agree. So, just having fun. Good man. You and Zeno have got a lot in common. Maybe. Do you think that people over complicate motivation?

Yes. I find that discussions about motivation, a lot of the time, you are the soundtrack to a lot of motivation, compilation video. That's right, yeah. Motivation universe, 40 minute, get up and get after it, jokko video. I think that a lot of the discussions about motivation can cause people to believe that there's some magical state that they need to be in before they do something.

Yeah, and as I've said since day one, motivation is a feeling that comes and goes and it doesn't matter whether it's there or not, discipline is infinitely more important. So no matter how you feel, get up and do what you're supposed to do. That's it. And that's discipline. That's not motivation. If you only did what you were supposed to do when you were motivated to do it, that's leaving it to chance. But if you're disciplined, you go to what you're supposed to do. That's the way it works. I went and listened to an episode you did with Sam Harris. Seven years ago now, long time ago, he came up with this really interesting idea where he said that you can't fake courage he did with Sam Harris seven years ago now, long time ago.

He came up with this really interesting idea where he said that you can't fake courage. Yeah. That's one of the most interesting ways to look at it. He said that courage or bravery, I think is actually what he was talking about. It's an emotion that you can't fake. If you fake bravery when you're terrified, that is bravery.

And I kind of feel like motivation is the same thing. If you do the thing when you're feeling unmotivated, that is motivation. That's it. So you're saying that all of the jocco videos of motivation, they can just go off of YouTube. Well, I say in a lot of those videos, and sometimes that's what it takes for people

to get motivated is to realize that that motivation doesn't matter. They don't need motivation after all. It doesn't matter. It's a self-defeating video. Just shut up and go do what you're supposed to do. Yeah, I mean the difference between the person that spends all day wondering about whether they should go to the gym or not, and the person that just goes to the gym or not, even

if they both go, they net out at zero, apart from the fact that one person has spent the entire day obsessing over it. Yeah, and probably wasting some brain power on it. Does this thing called the, I'm not science, called the anxiety cost, so you know, opportunity cost, right? That you, because of doing one thing, you can't do another thing. Anxiety cost to me is the wasted mental effort that you go through obsessing over something when you could fix it quite easily by just doing it.

It's one of the most compelling reasons for doing a morning training workout for me. If you've got a train every day, every morning when you wake up, you're daily to-do list resets, right? You get out of bed and then you're to-do list of meditate and walk the dog and answer emails and do all that. The sooner that you confront load that stuff, the rest of the day is just... Ah.

Yeah, discipline equals freedom. That's it. I mean, if you have the discipline to get up and get the things done, well, I've usually, I often tell a similar story. This is the same thing that you just said, which is, you know the weekend where you really only had two things to do for the weekend, whatever it was.

You had to write this thing, and you had to answer this other thing. And on Friday, you're like, I'll do it tomorrow, and on Saturday, like I'll do it. And it's basically hanging over your head the whole weekend. Where's the view just done Friday afternoon, the whole weekend would have been a lot better. So just do the thing. I agree with you. Just do the thing, man.

What does courage mean to you? Is that a good definition from Sam? Do you think doing doing the thing in spite of the way that you feel? Yeah, I think that's I think that's solid. I Somebody asked me a question the other day. Does courage have to involve risk? And I thought about it a little bit. I haven't thought, I don't sit around and think about a lot of stuff, which might be obvious, I guess, but yeah, I think if you're gonna, if you're gonna get credit for courage, then there has to be some level of risk, whether it's, you know, capital risk in doing something in a business or physical risk if you're

doing something to run into a fire to save somebody. Yeah, so I think courage has to have some kind of risk involved. And then yes, I agree with Sam Harris when he pointed out that if you're acting, if you're doing the thing, then that's courage. No matter how you feel inside, you're a little brain. You sure that you don't spend that much time sat around thinking of stuff because I know that you do a ton of prep for each of your podcast episodes and as you're reading

through a book, I mean, the insights that you pull out of that that you drag across between you. I think you might be doing yourself a bit of a service there. Well, yes, when I'm reading a book, I'm certainly applying the context of my life and my experiences and what I know and what I think I know to that, so I guess. But that's different than sitting around and thinking. Oh, you mean like the sort of the chin stroking? Yeah, I don't do a lot of that. Maybe I should do more. I probably need to. I'd be interested to see that. I could see you sat in a smoking jacket somewhere. Sagar. Yeah, I mean, you know, I think when I run,

I think when I'm doing Jiu Jitsu. I, surfing. Yeah, I think when I'm surfing. And those are just, that's a great kind of empty mind. And there's times where I'm running and I have to stop and write something down. Oh, you know, I'll pull out my, because I'll be listening to some music or something,

I'll stop and take a note in my iPhone about something that I just thought of. So, it happens. Courage is very hard to find when life gets comfortable for people. How can they stop their bravery from eroding when times are easy? how can they stop their bravery from eroding when times are easy?

I guess, I guess what we already talked about, do something that's hard and do it every day. That's one of the nice things about you, Jitsu. You're gonna get choked. You're gonna be uncomfortable. You're gonna get smashed. You're gonna have to tap out. Your ego is gonna get abused.

Your, go do that, go do that. Go for a run, lift, just do hard stuff. And that's a good way to keep that, I guess, fresh. You think that maps across, onto other areas of life as well? It certainly seems like it does, but there's no guarantee on any of this stuff. Really, there's no guarantee.

It depends on what kind of courage you're talking about. Are we talking about courage where you're going to die or you could possibly die? Is that what we're calling courage? Because there's people that have come from every walk of life that have stepped up in that situation and those people that have come from every walk of life that have stepped up in that situation. And there's people that have come from every walk of life and have failed in that situation. So if you're talking life or death, I mean, I think you actually have to get to someone that has sort of good with dying and they're okay with it. And then they're going to have a lot easier time pushing into that fold if it shows up.

Have you seen those Detroit self-defense videos? Uh, yeah, I think... Oh, I know I have them trying to think how I saw them, but yeah, because a lot of Gigi two people will repost those things, yeah. What... What do you think that people misunderstand? When it comes to life and death, fights, street fights, what do you think most normal people who haven't been in one misbelieve?

I don't know what that has to do with those Detroit videos. What? Those Detroit videos are definitely... It's a pantomime. Yeah, so I guess... So, I guess to answer your question, what do most people not understand about a street fight? They're probably not used to just the level of violence that's going to occur.

They're not, maybe this is what you're getting at with the Detroit self-defense videos or whatever they are. The choreographed maneuvers that work when you and I are going through them and sort of dancing, those aren't going to work in real life. And so if you think that you're going to be able to drop someone with one punch, you think you're going to be... All those things that are sort of the old traditional martial arts doing kata, and I do this to you and it causes this reaction, then my next move is over here. Yeah, that stuff doesn't really work in a street fight. Just, yeah.

The growing cake and the palm of the hand to the nose to run away from the female to run away from the attacker and stuff like that. Yep, it's not going to work well. And it's not very reliable. If you want to learn how to fight, you've got to learn how to fight. You know, you've got to do Jiu-Jitsu, Muay Thai, wrestling, boxing. That's what you need to do if you want to learn how to fight.

Have you been to go and see what Tim Kennedy is doing? I put his place with his self-defense courses? I have not been to one of his courses. It's called Sheepdog Response, but I've seen what he's doing. And of course, Tim's not only is he well versed in martial arts clearly, he's also well versed in weapons and he's also well versed in violence. And so I know what he's teaching is legit stuff.

I'm pretty sure they're using live handheld tasers as well, during that, to just show people precisely how difficult it is to whatever do the face palm and the eye gouge and the fish hook and run away. And I think he runs, I think it must be monthly, he does a special one for, not military personnel for the police. And even them, the amount of training, I think,

I mean, we've seen this recently right, that the training seems to be insufficient. Yeah, the training for police officers is totally insufficient. And it's horrible, because it's a very difficult job that you should be training. I've been saying for the last several years that police officers should train 20% of the time. 20% of the time that they work, they should be training.

And right now, it's probably not even a measurable percentage of time that they're working. I mean, it's probably in the fractions of a percent, that they're training. They get horrible training. And they're in really dynamic situations and in doing an incredibly hard job. You don't know how to do that stuff.

You know, that's, you talk about the misconceptions of the street fight is the person that thinks, well, you know, if someone messes with me, I'm just gonna get wild. And they think that's gonna work. And that's not gonna work, especially getting someone that's trained. So if you think that you're gonna have some magical powers

because you're angry or because you're adrenaline's going That's not does not true and it's gonna it's gonna cost you in a big way Especially if you come up against somebody like Tim Kennedy who's genuinely trained. Oh for sure Yeah, and you know this day and age Well, I mean I live in San Diego, California A lot of people train a lot of people train I wouldn't say it's the majority of people train, but there are a lot.

If you get into fight in San Diego, there's a decent chance you're fighting against someone that knows how to fight. And if you look, there's Jiu-Jitsu on every street in San Diego, Jiu-Jitsu academies. So yeah, if you just think you're gonna be a tough guy, it's gonna be rough, it's gonna be a rough tour. I saw a video the other day that you may have seen as well. Tim talking about changes he was making to his everyday carry. You see this? I don't think so. It was changing the weapon that he was using,

the pistol, because recently some of the active shooters have been using body armor. So he's now gone to a relatively small caliber, but armor-peasing round. Are you concerned about this increasing sophistication that seems to be coming from people that are shooters? Yeah, there's an escalation there, right? But that's the military went through this with the people we were fighting. They start wearing body armor. Cool. Roger that. You want to wear a body armor? We'll get armor-repairing rounds. You know, it's just a natural escalation of things, unfortunately, but it's the way it is. It's kind of like the predator prey dynamic, right? The evolution.

Yeah, yeah. The enemy's gonna make adjustments and we're gonna have to adjust back. What are your principles for an everyday? Are you allowed, can you have an everyday carry in San Diego? Yes. Right, what are your principles that you follow for that?

The same as a normal person that wants to protect themselves. Well, we had this recent Fourth of July shooting right and then before that we had Yvalda and then before that we had Buffalo. Have you got any idea if this is the sort of thing that can be stopped or can be restricted in some way? Yeah, I did, I did some podcasts on these things and some of the, the biggest, or I would say one of the most startling things and about, as you watch the evolution of this. So in, in 1955, in America, there was 340 inpatient beds for people with mental health issues per 100,000 people. So for every 100,000 people in America, there was 340 inpatient beds for those people, from

people with mental health problems. In 2007, it was 17 beds per 100,000. So the mental health capacity for treatment in America is gone down in a 95%. And there are some legitimate reasons why this happened. And a lot of it had to do with the fact that people were getting put in these institutions. And there were some horrible abuses that were going on in some of these mental institutions. People being committed that didn't want to be in there. People that were abused once they were in there. People that could never get out of there.

And there was a backlash against that. And all of a sudden became in the 70s, hey, this mental health facilities are evil, they're bad, there's abuse going on, we need to shut them down and they shut down a lot of them. And so in doing that, it certainly appears to me that they threw the baby out with the bathwater. And now we've got, I mean, you think San Diego,

there's two or three million people here. There's a lot of people that need help, that need help, mental health help, and there's just not a great place to get it. I don't know, I talk to police officers a lot. Police officers come upon people all the time that they don't need to get put in jail, they need to get put in some kind of a mental health facility,

but they don't exist. And so in jail, they need to get put in some kind of a mental health facility, but they don't exist. And so they go into jail for a little while, they come back out, and it's a problem. So if you take just the numbers of the beds, right? What is that done to all the other aspects of mental health? What about the outpatient people? How many doctors used to be ready to help somebody that was feeling depressed or was feeling angry? There probably were a lot more doctors back then that had the capability of

treating those things. So we've really shut down our capacity to help people from a mental health perspective. And then on top of that, we've added all these things into society that create more mental health problems, i.e. drugs, alcohol, social media, the fact that someone can stay in their house all the time, but then we put COVID on people where they had to stay in their house all the time, they're getting stuck in echo chambers. There's all these things that add to mental health problems and we've really done away with a lot of the treatment

that we had before. So hopefully in the coming months and years, we can start to get back to a place where we start to build up our capacity for treating people that have mental health issues because these shooters in these scenarios, they clearly are, they have mental health problems. It's a trend as well that's dominated by young men, it seems. And that, that seems especially sad because these are men that could be out working a job or starting a business

or being in the armed forces, contributing to something and instead they're off on a rampage. Yeah. It's horrible to see. One of the differences we were talking before we started about the differences between the US and the UK, I've spent a lot of time late nights in city centres working nightclubs. And I've spent a lot of time around homeless people. Two in the morning, the only people that are out at club promoters and homeless people and party goers. And the difference between homeless people in the UK and homeless people in the US is more stark than the difference between the cultures, by a distance. They are

significantly more Nancy evidently in discomfort and talking to themselves, shuffling along, rocking backward and forward, much more forthcoming, significantly more forthcoming, significantly more aggressive, even though I've never had anything super bad happen. Downtown San Diego, downtown Denver, downtown Austin, I haven't spent a ton of time in America, but I mean, there are a lot of them. And the safety net that we have in the UK

to sweep up people who fall through the cracks like that is it seems to work, right? You know, someone ends up in a really bad way mentally. A way you go, we'll pop you into a ward, you'll be looked after, we'll be given the medication that you need, there's no insurance that restricts that, but as you said earlier, on it's like a vicious cycle of the people who are the ones that are the most vulnerable, are the ones that maybe get sent to jail, perhaps they get hooked on drugs, the drugs make

their mental health conditions worse, which means that they can, they're further ingrained themselves into a life of either crime or homelessness, which takes them further away from a job and a balanced life. And yeah, I mean, it kind of doesn't surprise me, but it's pretty sad to see. Yeah, I'd be interested to know the numbers of inpatient beds per 100,000 in the UK. Because if you think about the homeless people that you've seen in San Diego, and there's two million people here, right, there's a lot of those people that probably would be swept up and put into a place where they're getting the right mental health treatment that they need.

And mental health treatment is not an easy thing to do. It can take an extended period of time to get someone sorted to a point where they're able to be go out and contribute to society. So yeah, I'd be interested to know those numbers, and even from what you're saying right now, my guess is England's probably doing a better job of getting people the help that they need.

How long have you been married now? I think 25 years. And you met your wife in Bahrain, right? Yeah. You remember the story about the first thing that you said to her? Yes. Would you tell that? Yeah, so I was on a deployment in the Navy.

I was on a ship. While we were on a ship, this is back before internet on ships. And we, to occupy our time, when you're a seal on a ship, there's nothing to do. You don't have a job. So you just sleep-eating lift is our joke. And you can only sleep eat and lift so long. And then we had a certain selection of movies on video tapes. And so one of the movies that we had was Ace Ventura Pet Detective with Jim Carey. And so we did a lot of imitating Ace Ventura Pet Detective. And when I, so we eventually went to Bahrain, my, the other squad, there's

two squads in the same opportunity, the other squad had actually gone to Bahrain before us. Squad two went to Bahrain for a few days. They were ahead of us. And we didn't know anything about Bahrain. We didn't know what was going on there. Because again, there's no internet, you just know some, go into some random place in the desert. And squad one had work to do. So we stayed on the boat for a couple of extra days, and then when we finally flew to Bahrain, Squad Two was waiting for us, and they were saying, hey, this place is like, there's good times to be had.

There's bars and girls and the whole nine yards, and so they had like, they were staged and ready to take us out. And yeah, we went to a bar and I, and I, a big, giant packed, kind of club slash bar. And I saw a tall, beautiful, blonde woman. And actually, actually one of my friends in Squad 2 had said to me, oh, there's these two girls, you're gonna be, he's like, I know you're gonna talk to them. And he was kind of a shy or guy. And I said, oh, I'm sure to work out with

you, man. You're, you'll do fine. And sure enough, walked in this bar, saw my, saw my future wife. And I just walked up to her and I said, in like a Jim Carrey tone, I said, uh, should I just call you Aphrodite, he's goddess of love. And she looked at me like I was an idiot, which was accurate. And then I bought her a drink and the rest, as they say, is history. How did you save that? I want to know how you turned that opening line around. You know, I did it in a ridiculous enough way that she could tell

I wasn't taking myself too seriously. I mean, it wasn't serious, right? So if you're not being serious, she laughed and we were good. I didn't say it. I didn't say, should I just call you, Alfred, I use goddess of love. No, if I would have said that,

I probably wouldn't have ended up with her. Yeah, I was having fun. What have you learned since being married to a Brit? Is there anything that you think has been a unique insight? You know, Britain, England, the UK, long allies with America, even though, I guess, originally, it didn't start off that way clearly. Look, the Fourth of July was a very difficult day for me. Yeah. It was a very difficult day.

Happy trees and day to all of it, and grateful colonias. No, I love the historical aspects of England. The military that I've worked with, the Brits that I've worked with, kind of, to me, represent what I think of when I want, when I think of England and when I, the way I kind of hold England and the UK in an elevated way in my mind, the British military that I've worked with

have maintained that standard, completely professional, stiff upper lip, squared away, ready to work, and just really just professional. And that's the way I always think of England. I'm interested here in the disciplining process of getting married and becoming a father, because you were someone who had already worked hard on being disciplined,

but this feels like a very different type of discipline. To the discipline to put up with a baby that won't stop crying, it's the discipline to be able to comfort somebody while you're away from them. That, to me, feels like a different sort of frequency of discipline. And I'm interested in what you've found as a challenge and what you've found as whether your military career had prepared you for marriage and fatherhood effectively? Well, first of all, insane amount of credit goes to my wife who is just... One of the things I've tried to explain to people about hers that she was emotionally independent, meaning she didn't need me to bolster her up and she handled everything. She handled everything on the home front, literally everything. And I would just go and go do my job. And she never complained about that. She never made any comments about it. It was, she knew kind of the priority for me was my job and that later on in life

and that strategically in our lives, the priority was the family, but she also knew that while I was in the SEAL teams, that was my number one priority. She knew that while I was in the SEAL teams, that was my number one priority. She knew that and I told her that and she said, yeah, I know I get it. Do you take care of your team? You take care of your platoon? You take care of your task unit? And I got this. I got these kids in this house and all that other stuff. And she never complained. She never...

She just did it. And so the vast majority of credit goes to my wife for being an awesome human being, an awesome mom to our kids. And I would love to give you some kind of, this is what you need to look for. And that's probably the best I could do, but I can't say that I looked for it. I got very, very lucky.

I got very lucky that my wife was, look, you can judge her looks. And obviously she was and is a beautiful woman. But the luck part was, she was, like I said, emotionally independent. She was strong to be able to handle, just mayhem, mayhem on a pretty regular basis. You know, from having a bunch of kids,

to I'm gone on deployment, and my wife is going to visit my wounded guys in the hospital or going to my guys' funerals. That's what she was doing. Team effort for sure, but she's the MVP. I'm just sort of, you know, the bench warmer over here. The, now all that being said, the, the, you know, from the military,

look, taking ownership of things, which I already talked about a little bit, but there's nothing really that goes on in my family that I don't, that I would say to my wife, no, that's your fault. Because I can just about guarantee that everything is my fault. When there's something that's not right,

when there's something going wrong, it's something that I, it's a mistake that I made. I did something wrong. Deescalation, right? Because my wife, while borderline saint, there, you know, she's a human being. A lot of my friends would argue that she's just a you know, she's a human being. A lot of my friends would argue that she's just a saint, but she is a human being.

And you know, she might get mad about something. She might get frustrated with me about something. And being able to deescalate those situations and not escalate them is very, very beneficial. And one of the best ways to do that is by taking ownership when something goes wrong. not escalate them is very, very beneficial. And one of the best ways to do that is by taking ownership when something goes wrong. So I would say the de-escalation part

taking ownership is definitely beneficial. If you're blaming your wife, you're probably that's not gonna work out great. And just the idea of trying to win, trying to win an argument. I mean, first of all, honestly, I don't really argue with my wife. I probably have been in less than a handful, less than three or four arguments in my life with my wife. And I can't even, I can't even really think of any right now.

I'm just don't want to, you know, try and make myself out or make our relationship out to be something that's not, but we don't really argue very often. And so I can't even really say that, hey, don't try and win an argument with your wife because I'm not really having an argument with my wife. I guess my, I guess my synopsis of this is pay attention to who you're going to get married to and try and pick someone that is emotionally independent that has their own, that can handle life by themselves. that can make some people feel insecure, right? I want someone that's relying on me all the time and I want them to feel like they need me.

And that might be a trap for you if that's what you set yourself up with. So that's what I do. Find someone that's emotionally independent, find someone that you get along well with, find someone that's calm. You know, someone that's not, you know, that's not gonna get bent out of shape

about little things. And if they do, it little de-escalation can kinda get the problem solved. And then just have fun. You know, my wife and I have fun. And I think that's important. It's very interesting to think about the fact that some people rely on a partner

who is overly vulnerable or overly anxiously attached as a way to bolster their uncensiburated assurance in a relationship. I've seen this quite a lot. Yeah, that's probably not gonna be a great move. And look, you, a person, I've seen this quite a lot. Yeah, that's probably not going to be a great move. And look, you, a person, I don't know everyone, all I can do is talk for myself.

And I would recommend you find someone that's more your equal, someone that you can engage with, someone that's, someone that you're part of a team with, rather than someone that you're sort of domineering over. I learned this the other day that there's only one sentence in the Bible about how you should choose a partner, and it says that you should choose someone that you could go to war with. I like it. That works.

That's legit. It's a team effort, a relationship, right? And would you purposefully choose a particularly vulnerable teammate because you're always going to be the person that's out in front? Probably not. Yeah. Yeah. Now to push back a little bit about that.

Look, there's guys I would be number one on my list to go to war with, that probably are not gonna be the best spouses in the world. You would get in relationship with them. They're gonna be tough for a female to be married to because they're wild, right? They're wild animals and they're the exact type of person that you would want to go to war with

and that I've gone to war with. And a lot of times they're the exact type of person that you would want to go to war with and that. I've gone to war with and a lot of times they're not going to be great as husbands. Fair point, yes. People as well have been thinking recently I spoke to Andrew Heuben in last week and he was explaining to me about the similarities between the grief process and the breaking up process. Currently, neurologically, it's incredibly similar. So distance in time and space and something else, I think. And he was talking about how when you go through a breakup, it is the same networks that are activated as through grief. And as somebody that has been to probably far more military funerals than

we can remember all would have liked to How does that inform your advice for people letting go of people that they lose in their life whether that be through a breakup or or through them passing? a breakup or through them passing? I talked about this on my podcast one time and speaking of Jocco videos that are out there and people have made videos of this, yes I have definitely lost too many of my friends and it took me a little while to start getting pattern recognition on what happens, and it's a very clear pattern. And once I kind of put that out there, I've now heard from many, many scores of people that yep, that's what it feels like.

And I think if you know what it's gonna feel like, just like anything else, if you know what to expect, then it's easier to contend with. So it's like a storm that is hitting you. You know, you lose someone, someone that you know dies. You are gonna get put into a storm. And what's scary about it is it's an emotional storm. And you have no control over it.

So you're gonna break down star crying. You're gonna remember bad things, good things. You're not gonna be in control of your motions, which is very difficult for adults because we're used to having some level of control over our emotions. So for a period of time, you're not going to be in control of your motions, which is very difficult for adults because we're used to having some level of control over our motions. So for a period of time, you're going to get hit with waves of emotion that you have no control over, and they're going to knock you off your feet, and you're not going to be able to finish a sentence.

It's very, very difficult. But over time, that storm is going to fade a little bit. And those waves are going to get weaker. And those waves still may come. So I don't know if you've lost anyone that's close to you. No, which is one of the reasons that I'm an only child to parents, like dogs. Dogs is it. So I have a particular interest.

Right. So there's gonna be times where it's been a month since your friend died. And you're gonna be sitting there and you're gonna hear a song or you're gonna smell a burger that you once had with this individual. And you're gonna get overcome

with those waves of emotion again. And you might start crying right there. You might have this massive wave of emotion hit you. And then it'll subside. And over time, the waves will become weaker and they'll become less frequent. And here's where people also get into trouble. They think that that means that they didn't care about that person.

And that's not true at all. It's just that your mind is processing it, and it's okay. So that's what happens. You start off with these huge uncontrollable emotional storm. That storm will pass. That's number one. Just know that that storm is normal, and it's gonna pass. And then it's gonna still hit you, but over time those waves of

Sadness and sorrow are gonna get weaker and they're gonna get less frequent and that's okay. That's a good thing and Look, I haven't broken up with a with a girl in a long time but I You know when when people ask me about breaking up with girls is you know, I've What you have to do when it's not working with a girl is wish them luck to give them the best of luck wish them luck walk away and don't look back and you're still gonna get those emotions those things are still gonna hit you but walk away and don't look back and there's two reasons for that

number one if there's any chance that it's going to work out, the best possible way for you to get it to work out is by walking away, by wishing them luck walking away and don't look back. That's the best way. How so? Because if there is something there, then she will let you know eventually. And if there's nothing there you're gonna know that too because you never hear it here from her again. That's fine The protocol for getting her back is to walk away and don't look back That's the protocols to move on the protocol if she doesn't want you back is to walk away and don't look back so I look and I know it's hard but

You'll you'll get some of those waves, but those waves will become less frequent and they'll become less powerful, and eventually you can move on. And then, the last thing I'll say about this is in both these scenarios is, remember, but don't dwell. So you got to, you look, you remember your friends, you honor your friends, you remember what they gave you,

what they taught you, what you learned from them, what was great about them, what you missed about them, you remember all those things, but you don't dwell in the past, and dwell on those thoughts, and dwell on the loss all the time, because that's not healthy either, and it's not gonna help you, and it's not what your friend would want you to do anyways. I like the insight around when you are going through grief,

and then you stop the sense of guilt that comes through because you feel now somehow that you're doing a disservice to that memory like you didn't really care or something like that. Yeah. It helps to, you know, it helps to write about what I've told people to do is write that personal letter and tell them what you loved about them, what you're going to miss about them, how you felt about them, what you regret, you write all that stuff in a letter, put it in envelope, bring it to their grave and put it there. And that will help you process as well. I mean, I've unfortunately or fortunately, I've given a bunch of eulogies for friends that I've lost. And in the beginning, I didn't really recognize

that that's a way of healing, but certainly writing down your emotions, your feelings, what you're gonna miss, what you loved about them is very therapeutic and it's very good. And so that's another thing I recommend, is you write that stuff down and you bring it to them. That's another Petersonism from his rules for life. He says, if memories still make you cry,

write them down. Yeah. That's a, you know, I talk a lot about being able to detach from your emotions and it's very important. Well, when you write something down, you are literally detaching from those thoughts because they're going out on a piece of paper that you then you can see. So it's a very important thing to do to write down if there's emotions that you have to deal with write down. And I just like to give someone some kind of an objective. So instead of just saying write down the emotions, no, here's write that person, tell them, and that will kind of be like a writing prompt to get you to write the right things about that situation. I'm pretty interested in your impact on kids, so I had a comment from a father saying how much he couldn't wait for this episode, because his son's read all of your books, and we're timing my nine-year-olds, mile, run times every week because of Jocco. So if nothing else, there is a nine-year-old out there

with his dad stood with a stopwatch as he sprints around a park and a Saturday morning or something at the moment, what business does a seal have right in kids' books? Well, I don't know necessarily if any seal has any business to do in anything. I know that I have four kids and that I wanted to, when I was raising my kids, there wasn't really any books that carried the message of the values that I wanted my kids to have.

And so I just wrote my own. And there you go. Pretty straightforward. Is that similar to you? Do you think entering into the... Is there a reflection there from the seals? The fact that there wasn't a guidebook or a handbook for operations when you first came in

and you've almost had this twice. You've had this in both your career and in fathered as well. Yeah. Like, there is some weaknesses to not having doctrine and there's also some strength when you do have doctrine. And you know, that boiled down to, I was very lucky that I joined the military because when I joined the military,

it was, I had a structure, a pathway to execute on and that's very, very beneficial for a young idiot kid that's filled with energy and rebellion and aggression. That's awesome. Here, take all that energy and aggression and rebellion and focus it in this direction. It's going to be beneficial. And you'll actually get rewarded for it. You'll get promoted for it. That's amazing. you'll get promoted for it. That's amazing. And kids didn't really have any kind of a code where, hey, these are some general rules that you will benefit from in life. And so there you go. That's the Warrior Kid.

What about kids or the parents of kids that are being bullied in school? This to me seems like a very unique challenge for generally for people to come up against because a lot of the time you're able to have an impact on a situation. You're able to do something that moves it forward, but you can go and have a conversation with the head teacher or whatever, but that doesn't necessarily fix culturally sort of what's going on within the school. There's only so much that teachers can do in terms of oversight. You can't go into the school and punch the other kid in the face, so that's also not the solution as much as you might want to do that. Well, it's not going to help your kid any either, right? You have to train your kid to be able to contend with the world, not tell your kid that you're always going to be there to back them up and beat up anyone that gets in their way.

Like, that's not going to help your kid be a come a better human. So, no, what you want to do is teach your kid, what you want to do is actually teach your kid how to fight. You want your kid to train Jitsu. You want your kid to train boxing. You want your kid to be an actual force to be reckoned with. And what's crazy about this is, as you mentioned earlier, if there's a much bigger person than you,

they can still beat you up. And that's the thing with kids. If you're 10 years old, you can be a really well-trained 10-year-old. But a 14-year-old is probably going to get the better of you, and maybe 15-year-old, but there's still gonna be situations that it's gonna be, you're gonna lose a fight. That being said, the risk for the bully goes exponentially higher when he knows that he's got someone

on his hands that can actually, actually knows how to fight. And so the probability of bullying taking place goes way down, way down. And even if that bully wins the fight, he's not going to look good. It's going to be a problem. He's going to get a worthless victory because he's going to beat up. He's going to barely get the better of someone that's a lot smaller than the bully himself. So, and all this stuff, all this stuff, I guess we could talk to Andrew Huberman, but this is stuff you recognize.

There's a primal recognition of someone that knows how to fight and someone that doesn't. And this is, kids can recognize this. They recognize, oh, I'm getting in this kid's face and he doesn't seem to be bothered by this. And he's got a little bit of a smile on his face. I might not wanna push this any further. And that's a real thing.

So, jujitsu, boxing, wrestling, moitai, will elevate that primordial confidence in a young man or a young boy or a young girl that is gonna prevent so much bullying from happening that it's incredible. So, look, can you still get beat up? Yes, you absolutely can. Are you probably gonna do okay? Yes, you absolutely can. Are you probably gonna do okay?

Yes, you most likely are. Is your, now what's lame is, you know, if you go back pre-UFC, there'd be martial arts instruction that would, hey, we're gonna help your kid with their confidence. And they would, kids would get more confident, but it wasn't based on reality. You know, going back to the Detroit, you know, your friend at the Detroit defense tactics. Go back to that guy. He's teaching things that might help someone's confidence, but they're not gonna help in real life.

So is that potentially even more dangerous? Oh, it's, it's, it's infinitely more dangerous. Yeah. Because a kid that knows Jiu-Jitsu, a 10 year old kid that knows Jiu-Jitsu, and, and there's a 14 year old kid, that kid knows, hey, even though I know Jiu-Jitsu, it's gonna be a problem. This kid's a lot bigger than me. He's probably stronger than me. And this is gonna be a problem.

I need to figure out a way to de-escalate this. As opposed to getting told, hey, all you have to do is this strike and that, that strike, and then you'll win a fight. No, that's actually not true. So, yes, that is more harmful to have somebody with fake confidence. That's a real problem. But in training and in becoming stronger, in being able to do pull-ups, in being able to run, you know, for the young kid that's running,

that kid's got some good cardio. If he's timing his mile runs, right? All those things are gonna help make a more capable human who is a lot less likely. By the way, he's more confident, guess what else he has when he's more confident. He's got more friends. His friends are now looking at this bully going,

hey man, you don't wanna mess with our friend. And now we have a situation where it's probably gonna get de-escalated just because of school yard politics and primal politics that play out between any group of human beings. I'll never forget when I was in secondary school, one of my friends Carl, his grandad, was a judo teacher and had been for a very, very long time and Carl had done it since he could walk. So, as soon as he walked, he was doing judo, and he's now 14 or 15.

And there was one of those kids in school that must have hit puberty at nine or something. And this guy's huge, and he was one of the big bullies in school, and I'll never forget that he squared out to him and Carl was grinning in his face, smiling in his face, just couldn't wait for something to happen. And I think that that kind of highlights one of the main differences. Getting in a fight is probably not that bad as a kid.

In fact, it could be a useful formative experience to make you educate you in the future about what it feels like to be in a physical obligation with people. The thing that's concerning it is the fear around the fight, right? It's the anxiety and the worries about the bullying. So in a way, yes, the skills, you need to have the skills that actually back up. You don't want to have reality, which is detached from what you predict is going to happen. But one of the most important things is to just feel comfortable in a situation that is going to become dynamic.

100% you know I tell this when I start talking to women about self-defense. If you have never had someone to grab hold of you, the mental hurdle you have to get over just to be able to respond in an adequate way is immense. That mental hurdle is immense. If you do Getsu, someone's grabbing a hold of you 27 times a day on the mat. They're grabbing your neck, they're grabbing your arm. You're totally used to this close proximity combat that you're entering into. So yes, a huge benefit of training to fight is that you don't have any mental hurdle to get over.

Your friend that trained judo his whole life, he was just ready to rock and roll at that point. There's no fear whatsoever. This is what he does every single day. That's, again, a great reason to get out there and train. It's kind of like a superpower. Yes, it's 100%. Jiu-jitsu is 100% of superpower. There's no doubt about it. I mean, this is 100%. And you know, that's one of my kids asked me when,

it was my son, he asked me when he was a little kid, the movie The Incredibles came out. And he said, hey, Dad, is there really such a thing as superpower? And I said, hmm, yes, there is. It's a little thing that you do every day. It's called Jiu-Jitsu. And eventually he realized that. Oh, I can actually fight anybody and it's going to be fine. And that's a very beneficial thing to have because there's always, I guess I'm a little bit biased because of the way, kind of the, how I grew

up. There's always violence. There's always some sort of inferred level of violence. I mean, a seal-potoon. There's a pecking order, you know, and it has to do with fighting. And that's the same with any group of knuckle-drag or Neanderthal men that aren't a group. There's always a guy that's, yeah, that guy's kind of,

he's the one that can kind of beat everyone up. That's the way it is. So I'm sorry that it's that way. I'm sorry it's not a cerebral contest, but man. But there's only two forms of communication. One of them is words and the other one is violence. And when the first one fails, that's when the second one comes about.

And I absolutely think, I've stood on the front door of a thousand club nights, right? I've met about a million people, stood on the front door of nightclubs. I have seen literally hundreds of fights occur when people have had a bit to drink. And I spoke to an anthropologist, and he was drawing parallels between the ways that particularly guys when they first start to fight, especially if they've their inhibitions are lowered a little bit. And he was drawing a parallels between that and the way that other animals fight as well. So you said one of the first things that you'll see men do is that they'll start to circle each other. You said what did he do? You know, when they've got the, they've got the antlers and they'll circle what they're doing, they're kind of, they're sizing each other

up and they'll circle and they'll circle and they'll circle and then they'll come in and they'll push first, maybe. And what's that doing? Oh, it's getting kind of a feel for what's going on. It's getting a sense of just how big is it? Do I really, really want to go? Do I want to go? Do I, right, I'll give it a, and then maybe you come back and do it again and then a circle a little bit more and circle a little bit more. I thought it was so fascinating. Do I really want to go? Do they really want to go?

Yeah. Like maybe I can just get away with a push and they'll realize that there's definitely comparisons there. I'm sorry to inform everybody, but we're animals and that stuff. Some of us are more than others. Yeah, some of us more than others. Some of us more than others. I just thought, there were you talking about women doing Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. Is there a particularly unique challenge? Women are very hardwired to avoid being grabbed and laid on by a man that's much larger than them,

even if it is in a controlled situation, right? Even if it isn't in a class or whatever. But there's some particularly unique challenges that the girls have when they begin to do Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu or have you found that there are hurdles that girls have to get over just generally. Is there something like innate in the programming that causes them to react in a different way.

Yeah. I would say it's not normal for a girl or a woman to want some dude all up on them. And that's what Gigi2 is. You are all up on each other. And it's a very, for lack of a better word, it's very intimate contact that you're having with another human being. So there's, it is a hurdle. It's absolutely a hurdle for women and girls to get over. And once I get over it, it's like, okay, cool. And then it's much better to get over it on the mats

in a Jiu-Jitsu Academy than it is to have to contend with that psychological hurdle when you're in a problematic scenario and you're being attacked. That is not the time to try and figure out what matters and what doesn't matter and what this feels like and what that feels like. Yeah, you want to train and you want to overcome that hurdle in a nice, safe environment. Thinking about the bullying topic, I was considering about what that causes in later life.

So I had a bit of a tough sort of school of bringing with bullying and stuff like that. And I was thinking about it, reflecting on it a lot. And I realized that a lot of the things that that created downstream in later life are the things that I most value in myself. And this has been a very difficult thing for me to kind of pass to just work out like, hang on a minute, do I need to thank the bullies in a way? Have they created some of the things in myself that I'm most valued? So for instance, moved out to America to come and do the podcast. That has only been afforded to me really because I don't care about being solitary. I don't care about being

on my own. I don't care about taking risks because for a very long time, I was in any case, on my own and everything was a risk, going to school was a risk, or going out for lunch, was a risk, or whatever. And then thinking about how, thinking about how I noticed certain things, right? I went to a party not long ago and was obsessed about the fact, for about the first five minutes,

obsessed about half of the people have taken their shoes and socks off but half of the people are only taking their shoes off and left their socks on. But the reason that I was paying so much attention is because in school, I would obsess over the way that certain kids had their hair cut or the way that they would carry their bag or the way that they would do their tie

because I was sure that that was the reason that they had friends and I didn't. I was trying to deconstruct in other people socially what was going on with them that meant that they, and obviously I didn't realize it's that they were sociable probably and were communicating well and whatever, you know, a classic only child with like sprinkling of autism or whatever. So like, but I really value that. I value the fact that I pay that much attention.

And it got me thinking more and more about a lot of the things that we really value in ourselves as adults are the light side of something that we probably are a little bit embarrassed about. And I was wondering whether, first off, whether you see that dynamic in yourself, whether there are things that you must value that have costs that you need to pay, and then also whether perfect childhoods create weak adults. So, going back to the conversation I had with Sam Harris, he kind of called

me out on the fact that I had said something along the lines of combat was sort of when I most felt alive and I wouldn't trade it for anything. And I also would say the worst days of my life were in war losing my friends and war is horrible. And the way I responded to it, and I asked him if he had ever known anyone that had cancer and had come out the other side. And he said, yes, and I said, oftentimes those people say, I wouldn't wish it on anybody, but I'm glad it happened to me because it gave me such a better perspective about life

and about value and about the fragility of life and all those things. And that's the way I feel about combat. I don't wish it on anybody, but I wouldn't give it up. I wouldn't trade it for anything. And so I think what you're talking about is a great way of looking at your past to say,

oh, okay, I had some hardships and I benefited from those. It's basically the same thing as saying, got bullied, good. Now I know how to handle myself a little bit better. I didn't have a bunch of friends. Good. Now I feel more comfortable when I'm alone. I think that's the same sort of attitude in both those situations. And then as far as how people are raised and what you get, it's an interesting thing. And probably the only thing I can talk with any level of understanding of,

and it's actually a lack of understanding, is basic seal training. Because basic seal training, you would think, well, you know, this person comes from a hard background, they didn't have much growing up, they're hungry, and now they have this opportunity, and they're never going to quit. Or you say, oh, you know, this person went to a nice private school, and they grew up with a silver spoon in their mouth. And when they get to this harsh environment, they're probably going to quit. And the fact is that's not true in either one of those cases.

Some kids that grew up in very tough environments, you know, working 18 hours a day on a dairy farm, they showed up to buds and quit. And some kids that grew up, you know, working 18 hours a day on a dairy farm, they'll never quit. And some kids that grew up with a silver spoon in their mouth, they show up in quit. And some kids that show up with a silver spoon in their mouth, they never quit. So I think there's some inherent characteristic of a person that your environment plays a role, but it can be overcome by determination,

and I think you probably have a lot more control over what you do in your life than your background does. That is the, I think the genesis of why I love agency so much, why I love, the ability to live your life by design, not by default, the fact that you get to forge whatever the path is that you want to go forward. Like that to me is, especially as someone that, like I said, maybe groupfelling, feeling a little bit helpless,

the fact that you realize, hang on, if I put this amount of work in and I dedicate myself and I'm committed and so on and so forth, the fact that you can come out the other side of that and realize that it has real world returns to you is phenomenal. It's one of the most rewarding, most empowering, I hate that word, but you know what I mean? It's kind of, it's just been ruined. Like, empowerment has been ruined. It's actually really useful and I can't use anything else, but it's good. It's actually really useful. And I can't use anything else.

But it's good. It's a great feeling. Yeah, that kind of recognition is what allows people to move on in life and take control of their life and make things happen. And you know, going back to your earlier thing about, you know, if you're in a relationship with someone, it's not working.

Saying, you know what, this isn't working. And I'm gonna move on. That's a good thing. You have to take ownership, and that doesn't mean ownership, meaning I'm always at fault, and therefore I'm gonna sit here and do nothing. It's like, oh, I'm at fault for even being in this relationship with this person, I'm gonna move on.

No factor. I've heard you say that you wouldn't be doing anything that you're doing now if it wasn't for surfing. How so? Well, surfing, oh, I started surfing when I was 10 years old. I was very lucky that a guy decided to teach me how to surf. A lifeguard said, hey, I'm going to teach you how to surf. And he did. And yeah, that's a huge, that completely directed my life,

because when you're looking at all the special operations units to go into, you know, there's Rangers, there's special forces, there's Marine Corps special operations, there's all these different things that you can go and do. And one of them is primarily focused on the water and one of them you can get stationed either in San Diego, California or Virginia Beach, Virginia. And it was just such a no brainer for me. So you're saying that part of your military career was dictated by where the good surf was? California or Virginia Beach, Virginia. And it was just such a no-brainer for me. So you're saying that part of your military career

was dictated by where the good surf was? 100%. Yep, 100%. And making it through training, if I wouldn't have surfed, I may not have made it through training because your comfort level in the water is so high from surfing, and I grew up surfing in New England, and it's freezing cold.

And so the cold water to me was a joke and the water problems were relatively easy for me compared to someone that didn't spend a bunch of time in the water. So surfing is a great thing to have in your background if you're going to go try and be a seal. Or if you played water polo, if you're on the swim team, something that makes you super comfortable in the water is gonna be highly beneficial. And that's probably the biggest separator

in people that make it, in fact it is. People that make it and don't make it, if you're comfortable in the water, you have a much better chance of making it. If you're, let me rephrase that, if you're not comfortable in the water, your chance of making it through seal training is very small.

So people that were, swimmers in high school, or whatever, massive, massive advantage. Massive advantage. Surfing massive advantage. Water polo massive advantage. Yep. I heard someone say to you the day that if they could,

if they could give their kids three sports to do throughout their childhood, one would be a martial art that's effective, one would be gymnastics to learn their body in space the kids three sports to do throughout the childhood. One would be a martial art that's effective. One would be gymnastics to learn their body in space and one would be some sort of swimming water-based event to learn their body and water. I thought, those are solid picks right there.

It seems like you're gonna create a bit of a beast to a kid there. Yeah, it's the whole water thing. I mean, you see this, look at any event, look at CrossFit games or something, right? And, the whole world is, I mean, you see this, look at any event, look at CrossFit Games, or something, right? And there's always one guy, because there's usually a swim, run bike, or a paddleboard, run, something else event in there. There's always one guy that swam in college, and you go, okay, so these people train six hours a day, five or six days a week for,

forever, and they're the elite of the elite when it comes to fitness. And a homeboy is half the time of the rest of the field. It can't be just due to fitness. It's got to be due to something. There's people with more capacity. He'll come 15th in a field of 40 over the overall. But on that event, you really do see the experience that someone that knows how to swim has. It's like worlds apart. Technique. It's technique. Just like anything else, just like Jiu Jitsu, technique will win, rock climbing, technique

will win. It's interesting that people think you'd be able to fight without training, but you... Why wouldn't you be able to play guitar without training? It's the same exact thing. But when I get really angry, my guitar comes out. Yeah, exactly. That's what people think, same thing with leadership. People think, oh, well, you can't really learn leadership.

It's like, no, leadership is a skill, just like guitar is a skill. There's moves that are just like playing chords, and people don't understand that. And that's, you know, one of the reasons I am able to, that's why I have a company teaching leadership. Because it's like, oh, you mean you're not just born with this? You mean you're not just born knowing how to swim, you're not just born knowing how to play guitar, and you're not just born knowing how to lead. You have to learn how to do it. And you can learn how to do it.

Oh, you can absolutely learn how to do it. As opposed to a fixed mindset of, this is me, this is where I'm at. I don't know guitar now, therefore I'm never going to know guitar. Right. I'm not a leader now. I don't have creativity. You know, first thing that we spoke about, can you explain to me,

I've always thought it's someone that knows surfing to explain this to me. Let's say that you're surfing a big swell and you go under. Can you explain how you get out from underneath a large wave when you're below the water? I've heard about you swim out sideways and there's like a particular... Well, so in what you're talking about, sideways, I'm assuming what you're talking about is certain breaks have a channel, meaning the waves break in one area, but there's deeper water on either side of the break, and therefore the waves don't break there.

And you can see this in any of the big famous surf spots, or many, most of the big famous surf spots, you can look, and you can see there's a boat sitting here taking pictures of people that are surfing the waves, that boat is sitting in deep water, and the wave is breaking in shallow water. So generally, if you fall or you're trying to paddle back out, you go into the deep water and you paddle out,

and there's no waves breaking there. Yeah, I thought it was something to do with the fact that if you would take an under the water relatively deep below where the waves were, that trying to swim either toward land or back is a bad idea. I'm gonna guess that. Oh, so what you're talking about is a rip current. So a rip current is an area of the beach

where the waves are coming in and a rip current takes all the water that's coming in towards the beach and it all kind of funnels in one area and goes back out to see it's called a rip current. And if you try and swim directly into the beach, you won't be able to get there because that rip current can be going three knots or four knots, it can be strong, and you can't swim that fast.

And so you'll sit there and swim to exhaustion and you'll die. So what you do is you swim parallel to the beach and then you'll drift out a little further as you swim parallel, but eventually you'll swim out of the rip current than you can swim into the beach. That's what I meant. Yep, there you go. There's two ways that life seems to be short to me. So one is in the fact that days go by pretty quickly and we seem to get old a lot sooner

perhaps than we expect. And the other is that tomorrow is not necessarily promised to us and that things can end pretty quickly. How do you think people can remind themselves of this shortness of life? We're very distracted at the moment. There is always something that can take us away from the present moment. And there are things that we're moving toward that are in the future. How can people remind themselves of the urgency that life has to it? I mean, you know, for me, it's real easy, because I know that a lot of my friends that are not here,

and that's all I need to know. And I mean, I think about that every day. So there's no, for me personally, there's no, there's no lack of urgency when I wake up in the morning to think, oh, don't worry, I got all the time in the world, because I know I don't. And I'm lucky to be here. And I'm going to try and live in a way that will at least do justice for my friends that aren't here. Tim Kennedy said that he'd looked back at a photo of maybe the graduating class that he was in or certainly some unit that he was a part of. And he looked at it and he realized that he was the only person that was left from that photo, the only one. And, you know, it's one of those things. It's kind of like the, I got cancer and

sort of didn't want it, but I'm glad that it happened to me because on the other side of it, it kind of feels a little bit like the same energy as that, That you go, well, do I want to lose all of my friends? No, absolutely not. Have I been able to, like alchemy, have I been able to take something from that? Like the bullying thing in later life, right? Have I been able to turn that transmute that into something that I really value?

And I suppose that that's one of the ways as well. It is about as good of a forget-yulages, forget the service, forget the nice words. It's okay because of what this person did for me while they were alive, now that they've passed. Look at how much more I'm living. Look at, I mean, is there any about attribute to somebody? Definitely makes you appreciate the sun sets more. We were watching it last night. It's very, very nice over here. It is indeed. Another thing I've been thinking about with the shortness of life is the

Psalm 34 and it's only been within the last maybe two years or so, two to three years, where age has started to actually feel like a thing. Now obviously, it was a new age was a thing. But for most of your twenties, what you're doing is you're becoming stronger, faster, smarter. Everything continues to get better. And then there's a point, kind of like at the top of a roller coaster,

where the inertia comes in and you feel everything be a bit weightless. And you such a real recovery from workouts is taking just a little bit longer than it used to. And injuries are taking a little bit more to get past. And I mean, the hangover thing has been happening since I was like 24. Like that was just linearly got worse since I was 24. But there is a point at which you become kind of aware of your own mortality, not in

a, my friends have died away, but in a entropy way. If you have any advice to men that are getting older and becoming chronically aware of that? Yeah, lift weights to go for run, stretch out, eat good, stop drinking. Pretty straightforward. If you don't use it, you're gonna lose it. Every day that you don't do work, you're going backwards. And it definitely will hurt you and it'll show up. You can't get away with what you got away with when you were 23, you, you, you, you, you have to, you have to stay ahead of it.

I had a Nate Zinser, Dr. Nate Zinser. He's a, one of the special forces, he was there, the mindset coach, the psychology coach. And he was telling me, I was asking him, what, what ages is it that you can finish applying for the SEALs? Is it 28 to 25? It's 28, I think it's 28 or 29. And I asked, what's the reason for there being an upper bound? I mean, there's guys in their 30s that are super fit, the guys in the UFC in their 40s that are super fit. And

he said, well, it's about what the body can tolerate, especially during selection. He was telling me the story about one of the climbing rope, climbing sections, 30 feet high, over sand, and some 20, 21-year-old kid fell from the top, flat on his stomach, and apparently just bounced off the floor and got up and started running. And he thought, actually, yeah, if he was 38, that's a very different reaction after you've

dropped 30 feet onto sand. Yeah, the training is going to destroy kids. And so if you're not ready to recover very quickly, it's gonna be a problem. And I think, you know, are there people that could pull it off? Sure there are. And there are. There are guys that get waivers that are 32 years old

and they're super studs and they make it. But if you did, if you ran the numbers, which I'm sure the Navy ran the numbers and is like, oh, the, I mean, quite frankly, I just learned this figure the other day. People that are younger than 20 have like a 5% chance and is like, oh, I mean, quite frankly, I just learned this figure the other day. People that are younger than 20 have like a 5% chance of making it through, of making through basic seal training.

Because they just don't have the maturity and they might not be strong enough yet. And I mean, I would say the optimum age is probably like 23, 24, you're stronger, but I mean, I was, I went through when I was young. I was 19 years old and, you know, you were pretty light as slight compared with now, right? When you went through, I started it. I was 174 when I went through. What are you six, one six, two, five, 11. Hey, okay.

Yep. And one 85 when I graduated. So I gained like 11 pounds going through seal training. And then, yeah. And, which is, you know, when you're young, I mean, my body is just, you know, seeping testosterone. You know, 19 years old, you're working out all day long. You're only going to be checking nuggets.

Yeah. Checking nuggets, getting after it, Just all the food you can possibly eat. It's awesome. But it's an abusive training program. It's hard on the body. It trashes guys, for sure. I mean, hearing Goggin's stories about his three times through,

I mean, he got, it was not due to quitting, right? I mean, his mentality was prepared to take him further than his body was twice. I mean, that got, it was not Judequiding, right? I mean, his mentality was prepared to take him further than his body was, twice. I mean, that must be brutal to think about the fact. I often think about this to do with athletes that get injured, how unfair it is that you get injured, because it's, you are ready to do the thing, and you may have done everything perfectly. And there's something, something outside of your control in your physiology that said, no, you don't get to do this.

Yeah, the seal training is not fair at all. It's not fair at all. And I'm sure there's good guys that don't make it because they just physically can't handle it. That being said, the way the program works, for the most part, if you don't make it, it's because you didn't make it. Like, they have guys... There's way more people that ring the bell

then have blown out knees all over. It's 80, it's probably 85, 90% that ring out. 10% that gets some injury that is incurable. Because they'll let you heal up. They let guys stay there for a while to heal up. But yeah, it's an abusive program. Say that with a smile on your face. Are there any other special forces, selections that you're aware of that are comparable in terms of the difficulty?

They're all hard. They all have their own tests and they are all screening out a bunch of people. And I've only been through one and they're all different ways of beating you up. I mean, you know, for instance, Ranger School, you don't eat a lot. So people lose 20 pounds during Ranger School. That's preparing them for being wilderness isolation. In the field, yeah.

Special forces has its own things to push you. So everyone's got their own little techniques of getting rid of guys. SAS is a lot of orientering. It's a lot of Breckenbeekens. It's up and down hills. Heavy Bergen packs. Yep. On your own. No.

You don't know how much time you've got. They just say do your best. You try not to let this catch you. You didn't make the time. You're out. Which is I mean, you didn't know what the time was, but you didn't know what the time was, but it wasn't fast enough.

In seal training, you're not allowed to wear a watch So how how fast you have to run as fast as you can at least for me I had to run as fast Seal training you're not allowed to wear a watch not a lot of wear watch You don't know how long anything is gonna take you don't know how long you've been swimming for your only choice is to go hard That's that's good right we just want you to go as hard as you can I That's good, right? We just want you to go as hard as you can. I did a reality TV show about seven years ago. And on that, they removed all of our watches before we went in.

And all of the clocks of the guys that came into change the batteries on our microphones, they changed them all so they didn't tell the right time. The watches of the drivers, the cars that we got in. And we never found out why that was the case. I thought I think it was because they didn't want us to know when we were going to bed and waking up because everyone was excitable and 18 or whatever. How long were you in the field for? I was in the show for about a month.

But I mean, what were the, what can I task? Were the time tasks that you were executing? So unfortunately this isn't as reputable as doing a reality TV show about Armed Forces. This is a dating show. And dating, like dating, like a bachelor or a nice female. Yes, scenario. Yes, sure.

I'm not equating the two between doing buds and going on love island. But my point is that I think what they were trying to do was just take the power from the people that were in control and disorient the people that were there. Now, there were actually, it wasn't like a challenge thing where people were having limited food or doing challenges to stay in and stuff like that. It was exclusively about romance, but what they'd found was that there must have been

something that they thought there was effective by doing that. And thankfully, I just didn't have to swim as much as you guys did. So I came out the other side of that feeling, all right. I'm glad you made it. I did. Well, I mean, like I'm here today, it was difficult. I spoke to Michael Punky Higgs, you know him, Seal Commander Chief, Master Chief. I spoke to him and he's doing some stuff with psychedelics at the moment, which I found absolutely fascinating.

And he very carefully walked me through the reason that he felt he needed, I mean, he'd had a gun to his head, I think, two or three times separately. He was really, really struggling. And he's doing, I think it's in Mexico, it's his place where he's doing psychedelic therapy for veterans. What's your thoughts on that? Uh, punk, he's awesome, awesome guy. I'm glad you said Michael punky higgs, because otherwise I said, Mike, I would have taken me a minute, but yeah, punk, he's an awesome guy. I've never tried that stuff and I've definitely talked to a lot of guys that it's helped out.

And if something's going to help guys out, I think it's good to go for people to go try it. But I haven't tried it myself and I don't know too much about it. I've had some friends that have done it. My friend Dakota Meyer had him on the podcast and he talked about his experiences. I've talked to Tim Ferris, a decent amount about it because he's huge into it at the moment, right? He is investing and yeah.

And before I had Dakota on and I knew Dakota and I were gonna talk about it, I actually called Tim and took notes so that I had a better understanding because I don't know enough about don't know, I don't know enough about it to be able to comment on it. For me, it's just being on the outside, trying to, trying to explain or at least share, I guess, share the story of people that have utilized them and it's been helpful for. So I don't know a lot about it. Was it Dakota that was talking, might have been unrogan about, it's a type of patch, some sort of patch,

or a single time thing that they maybe do on the neck? Yeah, that's another thing. That's a Stella gangly in block. That's it, that's it. And that's another thing that people use. That sounds absolutely wild. It's a single time thing. You do have to get it, you know,

periodically, you know, every six months every year. I forget what the date is, but yes, that's another thing that's been very effective for some people. So again, I'm not in any position to talk about this stuff with any knowledge whatsoever. Other than, hey, I've had some friends that have done it and they've said it's been useful, it's been helpful. Seals were a very publicity shy for a long time and that trend of the quiet professional was pretty strong. Do you ever regret being so recognizable or well-known? I mean, I spent my whole life just kind of being very, you know, unrecognizable.

And there's some very nice things about that. And, you know, when I, now that I'm more recognizable, you know, some of those advantages of being unrecognizable are gone, but for me, the being able to help people out, has been worth the pain, and I use that term very loosely, in worth the pain. And I use that term very loosely, worth the small inconveniences of being recognized by people. And most of the people that recognize me

are cool people that say, hey man, listen to your podcast, thanks. And I say, hey man, no problem, appreciate it. So it's, I'm not in some weird scenario. I don't have, most of the people that listen to the podcast are pretty cool people. And- You'd probably want to meet. Yeah, that I would want to meet and hang out with.

And they usually have something positive to say or some insight that they can give me, something that I missed, something that they could clarify for me. So it's all good. No factor, really. I walked down Broadway in Nashville with Jordan Peterson on a Friday night last year, and that was a sight to behold. That was like, I mean, he managed to accumulate a cue of people to see as he walked down the street, he was, what's that? Is that Jordan Peterson? And then he ended up buying a Stetson hat

and doing like the Michael Jackson thing, like the walk in an attempt to like get through the crowd. But yeah, I just thought he was interesting because he'd spent all of this time. And again, you had this culture in the seals of the quite professional and stuff. And I was just interested in the price that, you know... It's kind of like being in service again in a weird way, right?

Yeah, I mean, you know, compared with going to war, people coming up to you in the street or wanting to take a selfie and stuff, like, you know, not even in the same universe. But my point being that there is still... There's things that you have to put up with or do in order to get the message out there and your sense is that it's worth it. Yeah, it's it's fine. I mean, again, the amount of feedback that I get from people that are that have benefited greatly is well worth, you know, any small inconveniences that I might have in my life. It's no factor.

What do you think it was about your task unit that ended up, it caused it to contain so many particularly elite operators? I mean, it seems to me like there's been a lot, I mean, you know, yourself, life, Chris Kyle, who's the trial in there as well. No, he was not. But my point being like it's,

that's like a fairly illustrious list. Yeah, I mean, and I don't struggle to see to remember what word you just used to describe the level of operators, but I mean, we were kind of normal, kind of a normal task unit. Nothing spectacular. We got put into a combat environment that was a target rich environment and went hard in that deployment. And you know, that's kind of how it turned out.

and that's kind of how it turned out. A seal team, a seal platoon. You're gonna get, it's a bell curve, like any other group, and there's some awesome guys in every seal platoon. There's a bunch of really good guys in a seal platoon, and there's a couple, you know, not so awesome guys in a seal platoon, but they're gonna do their job too sometimes.

And, you know, that's the way it is. And, you know, we, that deployment had a lot of visibility on it because it was, because there was a very kinetic deployment. And, you know, we also, you know, just from a, from a historical standpoint, you know, Mark Lee was in, was it with us? And he was the first seal killed in Iraq and Mikey Montsoor was with us and Mikey, you know, was, was awarded the Medal of Honor posthumously. And, and so those kind of things sort of definitely drew the spotlight to what had happened and that deployment.

What was Chris Kyle like in real life? Just an awesome, funny guy that was a good patient sniper and cared about his job and cared about his family and was a good damn good sniper that would stay on his gun for a very long time and you know, he was also very funny, very gregarious, always doing pranks. Just a good guy, like we're talking about, kind of guy you want to go to war with. How did it feel watching that movie? You know, it's a Hollywood movie. And I kind of went into it with rudimentary understanding

that this movie's not going to be some documentary depiction of everything that happened. Yeah, they have to take a guy and take his whole life and take multiple deployments and condense that all down in this very short time period. They gotta take a very complex combat situation and distill that down into like good guy, bad guy. And that's what they did.

And also trying to show the sacrifices that the families make and how hard it is on the families. That was probably the most important part of the story. And so it was, I watched it. And kind of, as I watched it, I kind of understood those things. And, you know, like that was that. To me, the conversation around the family of service men and service women, families is definitely one that 15 years ago, I don't remember thinking about as much. And now is one of the things that's at the front of my mind, that when you

have somebody that goes on operation and serves, it's not just them that pay the price. And it's not just them and the support units that are out there and the drivers and the people on the ground and the fixes and the translators and stuff. There's a literal army of people back home as well that have to pay sometimes just as high of a price. Yeah, in some cases higher. You know, when I'm on deployment, I know what's happening. I know what is going on.

I know what the risks are. I know what I can do to mitigate those risks. My wife, my kids were too young to understand, but my wife, she knows what the risks are. She, and well, let me rephrase that, she doesn't know what the risks are. She doesn't know how we're mitigating risks. She doesn't know what it's like on the ground.

So it's very easy for someone in the family to start believing the worst things that are happening. And every, when you see that there's a casualty and there's two Marines killed in a long bar province or there's four Marines killed in a long bar province, and you know that the vast majority of those casualties are taking place in the city of Ramadi, which is where your husband is.

That can create some drama in your head and that can make that deployment worse for the family at home than it is for the guy that's on deployment. Think about whenever you've got a missing kid and what is it that the pair are missing anybody, right? When the family of that person are doing the press tour, trying to appeal, the thing that they also, even if it's been five years, I just want to know, because the open loop of being uncertain about something is literal torture. And yeah, I can imagine that by not knowing, it's not like you're WhatsApp messaging every couple of hours. Yeah, good. Just got to Ramadi, a bit hot here. His selfie, like that's not, that's not the way that it works.

No, so they don't know what's going on. And fear of the unknown is a thing. And so for the family's back home, it can be very, very difficult for sure. Would you ever run for office? Does that call to you? I don't. I certainly hope not. Yeah, I don't, I don't, I don't want to get involved in politics. And you know, I don't think it's just a disgusting sort of life and you know, my five friends that are involved in politics and it just doesn't seem like that doesn't seem like what I'd want to do in my life. What about running a school?

Obviously, you've got the stuff that you already do with kids. You have that foot in the door. Tim has got his thing, I've been Austin. Yeah. Does that call to you? Yeah, and I've got people that are, you know, again, Tim and I talked about this and Tim's doing an awesome thing with his school, Apogee Cedar Park. So and look at it, it's downstanding.

So with the Warrior Kid thing, I've got some some irons in the fire on that right now. Yep. What would you add into or what would be the, are there any big differences that you think would be made in a school syllabus typical to what you're aware of at the moment, if you were to be the person that was in charge. Yeah, 100%. Of course. Yeah, in charge. Yeah, 100%. Of course. Changes to this civilian school syllabus? Oh yeah, absolutely.

What would you change? Basic survival skills, right? How to start a fire? How to put out a fire? Basic trauma medicine, how you do first aid. Just those kind of things, how you change the tire on a car. Basic plumbing, basic electrical, like some life skills that are very beneficial, working on engines,

those kind of things, and those are things I would add to the curriculum, obviously Gigi Jitsu would be in the curriculum. I was going to say, if you were to do that, I would be so interested, If everybody was, if PE, I don't know what you call it out here. Yeah, we call it PE. If PE was heavily pushed toward learning combat and learning martial arts,

I would be fascinated to know what happens to bullying rights and schools. Yeah, how about everybody knows that everybody can go? Yeah, well, there's also, there's a natural packing order that gets established and it is what it is the thing is I've said this Jiu-Jitsu will not only Help you from get getting bullied. It was also prevent you from becoming a bully Because when a kid's doing Jiu-Jitsu, they realize, oh, I'm a little bit bigger and stronger

I can take this person, but there's someone that's bigger and stronger than me and they can take me. And so it helps on both fronts. What about working on movies? Obviously, we've had Cowboy Serone, Gina Carano, their people that have moved across into the movie industry. Would you be interested in that as a writer or maybe even as a person in front of the lens? Yeah, I mean, I've got some forward motion on both Warrior Kid right now and on the novel that I wrote called Final Spend.

So both of those are being, are moving forward in the, in the movie arena. That's pretty cool. Yeah, and those, it's take, Warrior Kid, it's taken a while to find the right people, but that's moving forward. And final spin took less, I mean, final spin only just came out and it was almost immediately was getting requests for a movie adaptation. Warrior Kid was the same thing, but it took a while to find the right people. And it's a project that I didn't want to kind of just haphazardly throw out there to the world.

So yeah, both of those are moving forward and they're going to come. How does that feel as someone who didn't grow up with, no, desire to be a writer throughout seals, throughout Brazilian jujitsu and surfing and stuff like that. And then you just appear with a fiction novel and now it's being turned into a film. How does that feel? What does that mean to you? I mean, I have so many stories in my head that's kind of crazy. That's the one that bubbled to the surface

and there's a bunch more that come up on a daily basis that it just a matter of which ones I'm gonna take the time to put onto paper. And, you know, I don't know. I don't, I don't think about that kind of stuff too much. I'm stoked, you know, it's very cool.

It's cool, I like it. It's going to be cool to watch this thing get made. And I'm stoked about it. That is a byproduct. The fact that you don't overthink, you don't think too much about the situation itself. I think it's a byproduct of someone that has a lot of forward momentum, I think that when you've just got lots of things

that are happening, you buy necessity, you've just focused on whatever's next in front of you. Yeah, earlier you were talking about thinking about whether you're gonna be successful or not, and oddly enough, I don't really, I don't really think about that. I don't think about how's this book gonna do, how's this, is it gonna get turned into a movie? I don't think about that. I don't think about how's this book gonna do, how's this, is it gonna get turned into a movie?

I don't think about that. I just kinda go. And I, sorry, yes, I agree with you. You're the Ford momentum piece. I'm kinda moving forward. And people that work with me, they know that I'm like onto the next thing. All right, hey cool, that thing's got some trajectory.

It's going in the right direction, cool. I'm gonna go on to the next thing and keep moving forward. I spoke to Heubman a couple of weeks ago, and I brought up with him about the fact that he's got tattoos that very few people have seen. Other of our photos on the internet is one of them in an octopus t-shirt, looking like this.

Have you got any tattoos? I'm thinking that you've got one. What is it? What does it mean? I got a tattoo when I was a kid, like,? Right, I'm thinking that you've got one. What is it? What does it mean? I got a tattoo when I was a kid, like, you know, I was in the heart of Corsene and, you know, we all were getting tattoos. And, so yeah, I got a tattoo.

It's like just a kind of a random design on my back. No real. It's kind of half finished and it's kind of dumb, but. Would you ever finish it off? I just, I don't care. Not bothered. Well, I guess it is literally behind you. Yeah. Yeah, it's literally behind me and I think one of my daughter said, you should get that thing finished. Yeah, I'm not gonna miss. I'm not gonna miss three days of Jiu-Jitsu to let her tattoo heal up. That is. It's not happening. So I know that you're a fan of the Thomas Soul quote where he says there's no no solutions only trade offs. And this is

something in a roundabout way that same concept is probably one of the most meaningful things that I've learned this year. What does that quote mean to you? How have you reflected on that? Well, especially from a leadership perspective, that's kind of where I talked about it for the first time. How the heck did you hear that quote from me? I don't know when I've said that. I guess I did some podcasts about it. But yeah, it's very helpful to people's mindsets, I think.

And that's when I talked about that, it was primarily to help people see that you're looking for a full-on solution to this problem, and there's probably not a full-on solution that's gonna satisfy every aspect of this scenario. So what you have to do instead is you have to look for what's the trade-off gonna be. I'm gonna win a little bit here, I'm gonna lose a little bit there, but overall, it's gonna move me in the right direction.

I think it's a good thing to understand as opposed to going through life, thinking that you're gonna find a 100% solution because it's not going to move me in the right direction. I think it's a good thing to understand as opposed to going through life, thinking that you're going to find a 100% solution because it's not going to exist. So you're going to have to make trade-offs in life. Douglas Murray came on the show and he was talking about this, sorry from Christopher Hitchens,

where Hitch told him that in life, we have to choose our regrets. And what he meant by that was the fact that opportunity cost demands that you're going to have regrets. And what he meant by that was the fact that opportunity cost demands that you're going to have regrets. And I'd always thought that regrets were a bug, not a feature of life. I didn't realize that they were baked into the literal fabric of how we exist. So you could make the perfect decision and still look back and have regrets about not making the other one. Simply because of that open loop that we were talking about before you don't know what the other thing could have been that's okay so that's interesting that regrets are a feature not a bug what was it mean that you need to choose them.

Okay well given the fact that regrets are baked into the fabric of life. When you're making a decision one of the things that you need to consider is which of these regrets can I live with, and which of these regrets can I not live with. And that, there's no solutions only trade-offs thing speaks to the same energy. 100%. Do you own a house? Yes. So when your, the Aurelis state agent agent told me this years and years ago When you're looking at a house there's gonna be shortfalls There's gonna be problems with the house that you're looking at and

Whether it's gonna be even if it's the perfect house. Well, that means it's gonna cost a ton So that's the trade-off that you're gonna make and so what you have to do is you have to break down like what you just said Hey, listen, I wanted a bigger yard But this one has a huge garage. I'm gonna go with it have to break down like what you just said. Hey listen, I wanted a bigger yard, but this one has a huge garage. I'm going to go with it. You just got to figure out those trade-offs. There's no solutions. You're not going to get the perfect house until you build one. And even when we build one, guess what? You're going to look at it when you're done and you're going to say, I should have moved this wall 24 inches to the west, right? It'll eat you up. Talk to me about your approach with the long term plans

because I've heard you mentioned that real long term plans are something that you don't necessarily optimize for. You seem to optimize a little bit more for optionality and for kind of a medium term thing. What's your thinking around that? Yeah, I don't know what I'm gonna be doing in five years. People, what's your five year plan? I have no idea what my five year plan is,

because I don't know what opportunities are gonna arise, I don't know what things I'm gonna fail at, I don't know what mistakes I'm gonna make, so how am I gonna sit here and tell you where I'm gonna be in five years? I can't. And if I did, I'd probably be shutting off some opportunities that are there

because I'm too close, minded, and focused on some five-year plan. So I make iterative decisions about things. I move a little bit in some direction. I get the feedback from it, was it good, was it bad? Should I put more resources toward it or not? And then as time goes by, I've either moved significantly in that direction or I've realized it's a dead end and I'm gonna move away.

It was more convenient a year ago, when I'd say five years ago, I didn't have a podcast, I didn't have a book, I didn't have anything. Really? That was five years ago. So my five year plan, if you would have, six years ago, my five year plan would have been, like, oh, I guess I'll be training Jiu Jitsu.

I would be training Jiu Jitsu and surfing and hanging out with my family. Working with life, probably doing Eschelon Front, but maybe a slightly bit bigger. Maybe not even. I mean, I don't know. We didn't jump in and invest some huge amount of money into Eschelon Front. No, we started, hey, does anyone want to learn this stuff? Oh, yeah, it looks like they do.

Oh, yeah, it looks like a lot of people do. Oh, it looks like it's very beneficial to them. Oh, they're telling all their friends that other companies that they should do this stuff so they can get better and That whole way down the path. Yes, we'll spend more time. We'll invest more into it. We'll write a book about it. Cool. That made sense. So That's what that's what I have to take the the approach with everything what opportunities are gonna knock on my door today What opportunities have I started that are gonna close tomorrow tomorrow? I don't know. So I don't spend, I don't want to invest a lot of time and energy trying to predict where I'm going to be in five years when I don't know. I really resonated with that. I really like it because especially in the online productivity

world, you know, you should break down the 25 year plan into five year blocks, into one year sprints, into quarterly goals, whatever. And it's just never resonated with me. It's never resonated. It doesn't appeal to my nature. It doesn't appeal to the way that life is by design unpredictable. And you don't know what skills you're going to acquire,

what setbacks or advantages are going to acquire, what setbacks or advantages are going to come your way. And that was, you're one of the first people I've heard who's really succinctly put it together as a look. I don't have, and you're someone that if people were to think, jockos, the kind of guy with a plan, right, you don't go into battle without a plan. You're well, yeah, but the entire war is something that requires us to respond as it occurs. Yeah, look at the mistakes we've made.

Well, America is made as a country and war. Why? Because we had a long-term strategy that didn't make sense. And guess what? No one was willing to say, hey, this long-term strategy we've got is not working. We need to make some adjustments and we need to do it now. Instead, nope. Ignore those numbers.

Ignore the feedback loop that we're getting. Just press forward with this strategy that we're on. It doesn't work. So I don't want to have, you have to go into battle with an idea of where you want to get to. And then you, as you start moving in that direction, you've got to say, oh, that wasn't what I thought it was going to be. We need to make some adjustments. That's the disciplining creativity spectrum coming up again. It is indeed. Looking from the outside as somebody that's black belt in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, the stuff

that you're doing with Origin, bringing manufacturing back to the US, writing books, books being turned into screenplays and movies and stuff like that. And everything else that you do, that from the outside can look like something which is incredibly desirable as a position to get in. One thing that I've learned over the last few years, especially since spending more time around, the people that are successful and have accolades and stuff is that often this price is that they pay for getting to this stage that they're at, that the people who want to be there wouldn't end up paying. So what I've come to believe is that a lot of the time people have very, very is that a lot of the time people have very, very high bars and challenges that they need to get past. I'm interested in what the price is that you have to pay in order to sort of be jocker-willing

on a daily basis. Work? Work? A lot of work. You know, when when you're watching TV or you're, you know, looking at Instagram or you're, you know, going out for dinner on a date and you go to a movie, I'm not doing that. I'm reading a book. I'm getting ready for a podcast,

I'm writing something, I'm preparing for something, talking to a client, I'm designing something, I'm thinking about a new supplement, like, it's just, just, it's just kind of all the time. And so, this guy asked me the other day, are you working more now than you were when you were in the SEAL teams, and the answer is 100%. Yes, I'm working harder now.

You know, I should say I'm working more because I'm working more time. No weekends, no weekends, no evenings, really. Luckily for me, I like what I do. I was going to say, so would you even want that? You know, would you want to spend an afternoon on the couch watching Netflix? Is that something after a very long time of driving discipline? Is that a desire that you have any longer?

Is it on the couch watching Netflix? I mean, that's not super stoked on that. Yeah, that's my point. Yeah. You've managed to align what you want, and what you want to want. They're now sitting on top of each other. Right?

I also don't do a lot of what I don't want to do and my partner, National Front-Lafes, Babbon pointed this out to me like a year ago. He just said, he said, you know, you've, oh, you're really good. He was doing some stuff that he didn't want to be doing. And, you know, whether it was administrative stuff and, you know, he said, you know, I've got to do this and I've got to do this and I said, why are you doing that? And he said, well, what do you mean? I said, you all got to do this and I'm gonna do this. I said, why are you doing that? And he said, what do you mean? I said, get someone else to do that.

And then, you know, a week later, he's talking, he goes, you know, I was thinking about what you said, you're really good at not doing what you don't want to do. And I am good at doing, I am good at not doing what I don't want to do. I mean, administrative stuff, stuff like that. I don't do any of it. I don't do any of it.

Do I have an accountant? Does an accountant cost me a lot of money? Yes, they like that, I don't do any of it. I don't do any of it. Do I have an accountant? Does an accountant cost me a lot of money? Yes, they do. Do I worry about it? Nope, not in the single bit, not in the slightest way. Don't worry about it at all. And I don't have to deal with it.

And my taxes are getting done. You know, that's a crazy amount of work and effort. I don't do any of it. Logistics for my online store. Do I do effort. I don't do any of it. Logistics for my online store. Do I do it? I don't do any of that. I don't do any of that. I don't touch that stuff.

So all the stuff that, what I get to do what I like to do, the weird thing is it is a lot and it's gonna be, it's challenging for people to do. It's challenging for people to do it's challenging for people to do it's challenging it's challenging you know uh you know my wife she's like you know I said well that's not I said you know she'll say like what about this and I'm like I'm not gonna do that and she says you're not normal you know and I said okay fair enough she doesn't think I'm normal and I think she's probably right.

I fear she may be right as well. Yeah. So what's the principle there that people can take away? Is it to try and outsource the things that you don't want to do, especially let's say that it's someone that's growing a business

or that is beginning to get themselves to the stage where they have the resources to be able to do this as quickly as possible. Give away the things that you don't like to do to people who can do them. Yeah, and there's certain things that only you can do. Yes, do you do those things? Yes. And let other people do things that other people can do. And look, I'm also, you know, if you want to get straight business, business tactical, I tell people all the time, you know, you keep things small and you let the demand signal increase and you grow as the demand signal increases.

And as opposed to work. I'm not, I don't jump in and say, oh, I don't like doing paperwork, and I've got a business that I've had for three months, and so I'm gonna hire someone as a CFO to run my accounting right now. No, I'm doing that stuff. I'm doing that stuff until we have enough income

to comfortably say, yeah, we can get someone else to do this now, and I can then focus on what I'm good at. So, I've done that with all my businesses. Start small and grow. As the demand signals there grow. And you know, I've done things that didn't work. And luckily I didn't invest a bunch of time and effort into them because, hey, I'm going to be wrong a lot. And so just because I think something is cool doesn't mean other people are going to think it's cool. I happen to like some random thing and some people might not or a lot of people might not like it. So I'm not going to overly invest in something that that people might not want at all.

Thinking about the stuff that you can afford to outsource and the things that you can't, I think a good heuristic is what you've just said that. So what are the things that only you can do? Only you can do your podcast. Only I can do my podcast. Precisely. Only you can write your book, etc. Another one that I learned the other day from Leila Homozi is a lot of the time, let's say that someone's got a company, a sales company selling software or IT or whatever. One of the first people that they'll bring on is a salesperson and then they'll begin to do operations. And she said, well, hang on, that's the thing that brings the money in.

That's the thing that gives fuel to the engine which you're hoping will drive everything else. So I do think that there's another element that I learned from her, which is do not outsource the thing that drives the revenue. The thing that drives the revenue must be protected at all costs. And if that thing is you and another element that links back to what you just said there, if that thing is your motivation, how can we protect the motivation?

Well, my motivation is waning to do the thing, to write the book, to do the podcast, to give the speeches, whatever, because of the amount of administration. Okay, let's lean into that even more. There's, that's the point of highest leverage for us. Get that blockage out of the way. Yeah. And I have all kinds of people that do all the stuff that I'm either a not good at or b don't want to do, which is beautiful. You know, it's a beautiful thing. That's decentralized command. It's the fourth all-in-one combat leadership. Hey, what's going on in,

we have five factories right now at Origin USA, right? What are they? Three in Maine, two in North Carolina. So that's an incredible amount of logistics and, I mean, just leadership that's going on inside those. And the technical aspect of weaving cloth and sewing and setting up lines for production, that's incredible amount of work and effort and knowledge that I don't have any expertise in whatsoever. Guess what? I have a team that does. I have people that are awesome. And so that's what's going on. Ashlam Front, we have scores of clients.

And they need help in leadership. I can't teach them all. Guess what? I have a whole team of people that has their own experiences and they're out there every single day teaching clients the leadership lessons that we know. Jocco Fuel, the same thing. You were asking me earlier,

like what goes into making these things? Oh, am I giving strategic guidance about what I want? 100% am I taste sampling, which by the way, there's a good example of something that didn't work? You know, the first, we made an energy drink. The first version of the energy drink was based on my taste buds.

Well my taste buds, since I don't drink a lot of sweets, the first version that we made was not very sweet at all. To me it tasted like maple syrup practically, but I had to open my mind and get feedback and people were like, no, actually this doesn't taste good. Okay, well then let's change it. We just changed, we just changed every single flavor starting now. But that took trial and error of me saying, wait a second, I love the way this tastes,

but seven out of 10 people would think, yeah, it's okay. Three out of 10 people would say, this doesn't taste good at all. That's not a success. You gotta have 10 out of 10 people say, this freaking taste delicious. And look, you got different flavors and have 10 out of 10 people say, this freaking taste delicious. And look, you got different flavors and maybe 9 out of 10 love all the flavors

and there's one that, oh, they don't like this one, but I've gotta take that feedback and adjust to what I'm hearing. But that's an example of, hey, we went down this road of this certain flavor and a flavor system that was based on my taste, which is why I know that I have to open my mind and take other opinions and listen to what other people have to say.

And now we've got taste that are delicious and universally delicious. And so now we can kind of go hard and getting it out there because before there's a risk of, hey, how many times are you gonna get someone to try a drink one time? If it tastes like junk, they're not getting it again. So now we've got taste that are delicious and now people, yep, try it. Now we can win on taste, which is awesome. We're already winning on efficacy and health, but you got to win on all fronts. So now we can

win on taste too. Well, it's coming up next? What have you got for the rest of the year that's coming up that you're excited about or interested in? Probably one of the biggest things is we've got a hunt line coming out from origin. So we're making a full line of hunting clothing hunting apparel from the base layer all the way out to the outer jacket. So that's been a huge undertaking and it's very aggressive.

It was very aggressive. What do you mean? Trying to get that done in a short period of time was very aggressive. And the reason we were able to do is because everything's in America. The reason we're able to do is because we're able to literally make a design change and

have it 15 minutes later for testing. You can't do that when you're working with an overseas company. It's impossible. It's at a minimum if you're flying it, it's going to take three, four days, four, five days to get back. It's got to get in line, you know, control the line. It's a travesty, but we were able to, because we're all manufactured here, and the material that we're uses from here.

So we don't even have to wait for some material to ship from overseas. Everything is 100% American made. So that was a huge undertaking. We're starting to get to that point where I think I'm getting my first set of the kit here in another week and then it'll be going into production. So that's pretty cool. We have an online training academy. So the leadership thing, again, we talked about leadership being a skill.

Just like you can't go to the gym in one time and get in shape or you can't change your jitsu one time and now you can defend yourself or you can't pick up a guitar one time. It's the same thing with leadership. You can't just sit through one seminar or read one book and go, okay cool, I've got I mean, imagine if you picked up a book on guitar and you read it and now you thought you were going to be able to play guitar or you read a book about basketball and now look you would get the concepts down you understand what you're gonna be working to or toward but it's a legitimate skill that you have to employ in scenarios to get better at. bit of a blessing from COVID, we had created an online platform for a client that had 157,000 employees worldwide and they wanted us to train all their employees. And so I said, hold on a minute, because that would have basically been the dedication of the entire team at National Front

to make that happen, traveling. And so we had created before COVID, we had created an online training platform. And then as that, as COVID hit, we immediately said, okay, looks like we're doing this stuff virtually. And what was beautiful was the entire world was made to do virtual interaction. Whether it was talking, I knew in Easter, I had whatever, Easter dinner with my parents via Skype call or Zoom call or whatever.

And I said, yep, this is the norm now. Everyone's going to understand the capability, the benefits of being able to utilize video interaction. Because before that, before COVID, it was rare. I mean, how many video calls did you do before COVID? Apart from for the podcast, it was my input from that. Up until COVID, video podcasting was seen as a second rate thing to do. Don't get me wrong, I would much rather sit down. But especially as a fledgling creator coming up,

I didn't have Joe Rogan money, right? So I couldn't have a nice studio or fly guest out or do whatever. So for me, that was how I was competing. Then everybody had to do. Yeah. You want to keep your show going? You want to keep publishing? Completely flattened the field.

Right. Which meant that what are we competing on now? Oh, well, we're competing on the quality of the conversation. We're not competing on how fancy the studio is. Yep. Well, that's interesting. And so has that happened to you? And has it happened to every family in America

that suddenly realized they were going to utilize and they understood the technology now? Because there's a technology barrier. So now at Ashislang Front, we said, okay, great. Now we can train people on a much more regular basis. We can offer them. So we made Extreme Ownership. more regular basis. We can offer them.

So we made Extreme Ownership.com, which is an online training platform for leadership and for life. Because if you're... So that's not just for corporate, that's also people can go do that themselves. It's individuals. And it's individuals. This is the thing that, you know, part of the thing that people need to understand is, if you're a human and you interact with other human beings, you're in a leadership position.

It doesn't matter if you're a frontline worker and you're not in charge of any other people, but guess what? You're interacting with your peers. You're interacting and you have to lead your boss. You have to be able to lead your boss. Your boss doesn't know what's happening in the field. Your boss doesn't know what time that concrete should be poured. Your boss doesn't know what time those forms need to be set up by. It doesn't know what time that concrete should be poured. Your boss doesn't know what time those forms need to be set up.

It doesn't know that. You have to lead your boss in that right direction. You have to lead your peers in the right direction. You have to lead your family in the right direction. You have to, even if you're, by leading your family, that means putting your ego in check and listening to what your kids have to say. So there's everybody's a leader and once people understand that,

there's so much they can get out of actually learning leadership skills. So that's been pretty cool on the Eschelon Front side. So that's the origin side, that's the Eschelon Front side, the Jocco Fuel side. Again, we rearrange these flavors. We've, so that's been huge. And the rest of the supplement line is just, it's just making high quality stuff

and not cutting corners. And we're, look, in the beginning when you're doing that, it's hard, right? Because you think, well, wouldn't it be just easier if we did this? Couldn't we just cut this? Couldn't we use a little less of this protein? That's more expensive.

It's expensive type of sweetener or whatever. And so you wanna make those cuts early on and we didn't. And look, quite frankly, when my name is on the freaking label, I can't just cut corners. But now people recognize that, they recognize that when they buy something from Jocco Fuel, it's as good as you can get. It's the best quality stuff that you can get. So that's starting to take hold.

And so that's been great to see as well. Jocco willing, ladies and gentlemen, if people want to keep up to date with the stuff that you're doing, where should they go? Jocco.com. Jocco, I appreciate you. Thank you. Thanks, man. Appreciate it.

Jocco.com. Jocco.com. Jocco, I appreciate you. Thank you. Thanks, man. Appreciate it. Thank you.