The Chris Cuomo Project - David Goggins

Episode Date: February 7, 2023

In this week’s episode of The Chris Cuomo Project, David Goggins retired U.S. Navy SEAL, ultra-distance athlete, and author, “Never Finished,” joins Chris to discuss how to unlock your own potential to achieve greatness, why resilience is more permanent than hope, the importance of tuning out criticism on social media, and much more. Follow and subscribe to The Chris Cuomo Project on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube for new episodes every Tuesday and Thursday. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

People only put up on social media what they're good at. They put up all the good times. They don't put up the bad times. I put up the bad times. But what you have to realize about all these different things, you will never in your life meet a hater do it better than you. Hey, everybody. I'm Chris Cuomo, and welcome to another episode of The Chris Cuomo Project. Please subscribe. Please follow. Remember to wear your independence. Stay free. Stay a free agent. Get some merch, and we'll use the money to give to good causes together. David Goggins, stay hard. Amazing guy. Amazing pedigree. Amazing instructions for the rest of us. Look, you're not going to run 100 miles or do 4,000 pull-ups like he can,

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and important safety information. You're going to need a subscription. It's required. Plus, price is going to vary based on product and subscription plan. They're in the military. They say first time, after time. Well, I wasn't that guy.

I failed everything I did the first time. I was known for coming back even harder after I failed. Success isn't a straight line. It's a maze. Easy to say, hard to do, but you'll never do it if you don't have a plan. Now, you may have noticed I say let's get after it a lot, okay? If you see videos when I'm training, whether it's self-defense or fitness, I often say, oh, finally, done, but never finished. I practice a lot of self-talk. I try to focus very much on what I control, and I try not to stay where I failed. These are all ideas that I got from David Goggins. I don't know him, but when I was low and going through my recent troubles, his story, which I got in this book, Can't Hurt Me, okay, about what he went through, his backstory, and how he decided to make a difference for himself,

this made a difference for me, okay? And the philosophy that he then developed for all of us in this book and the workbook that I have and videos that are online, Never Finished, is a way that you can help yourself understand how to evolve and get yourself to another level just by your own power, your own wits, and your own resolve. And it's not about me. It is millions that he has inspired. He has requested to speak all over the world. And I'm not even talking about why they call him the toughest guy in the world. He was in the Air Force, then he was in the Navy SEALs. He was a complete Army Ranger, all in his late 30s. It's not even just unheard of. It's historic, okay? He then retired from

the service. He became an elite and extreme athlete, ultra marathon runner. One year, he ran like 700 mile marathons, three of them in a month. He set some pull-up record. He did like 4,000 something in 17 hours. He actually failed to break the record for the first time, did it again. And now he works in an emergency room part of the year. And he works as a smoke jumper. You know, those guys who go in there to fight the forest fires? The other part of the year. While he works as a smokejumper. You know those guys who go in there to fight the forest fires? The other part of the year. While he's writing these books, they put them out themselves. We'll talk about that, speaking all over the world. How? How does he do all these

things? Well, he had depression. He was obese. He had health issues. He sucked in most measurable ways, he'll tell you himself. He could barely read. He cheated his way through school. One day, he had a change. He calls it hardening his mind. How? That's the point. It is not some secret. It's a method. Now, I don't want to over-talk it because I want him to talk. So, I want to bring him in right now. The author of the new book is never finished, and there's a great workbook that goes along with it that's very helpful. Can't Hurt Me was a seminal work

that really put him on the map. He does not do a lot of TV, does not do a lot of interviews. So I thank Dusty, and I thank David Goggins' wife for making this happen and finding time for him. It is a great pleasure for me to meet you, Brother Goggins. Thank you for joining us on the show.

Hey, man, you guys are very persistent. So I appreciate you having me on, brother. Thank you. Well, look, I appreciate you. You hear it all the time that your words and your deeds made a difference. Yes, the power of your example, but I was never going to run 100 miles. The only way I'd run 100 miles is if somebody was carrying one of my kids in front of me and I had to catch them.

But the mentality, what you learned about what it takes to unlock your own potential, what have you boiled it down to in your own mind in terms of what matters most in terms of change, David? I guess to me, there's several things and it's hard to boil it down to this one. But, you know, I sat around for a lot of years, you know, after I got abused. But a lot of the

abuse came from myself. While my dad abused me and I, you know, had some bullying and learning disabilities and all these different things growing up, I thought that there was this, you know, and all these different things growing up, I thought that there was this fallback plan, this mythical fallback plan that we all have. The harsh reality was the fallback plan was me. And once I realized that after years of just sitting around waiting for something to magically happen and propel me into the right place,

that's a hard reality when you realize that you are the fallback plan. And that's when the work started happening for me. We're going to talk about the work and how you map it out for your own individual case. But let me ask you something. What does it mean to you to be referred to as the toughest guy in the world and to be called the gold standard and extraordinary and superhuman and all of these

different descriptions of you that make it sound like you're a one-off, that it's almost unattainable what you've done with your life. What does that mean to you in terms of your message? I mean, I guess the whole hardest man in the world thing that you can call it what you want, but that title came from where I came from. And, you know, it's like, you know, I had limited horizons. So if you were to have a million people in a room and you had all of their resumes, like from the age of one to the age of 20, you would never pick me being where I am now. And that's where the hardest man in the world came from was, you know, how many people can come from where this man started to where he is now. So it wasn't really so much about, yeah, all the physical feats, you know, going through, you know, still training three times and ranger school and all these things I've done that helped give me that title. But the biggest reason I got that title was because when I realized, you know,

I was a fallback plan, I just refused to give up. And the thing about that, Chris, is that more, I figured this out. Most of us are only one to 10% away from greatness, but we think we're so far away from it that we never try. And once I started going down this journey, I started realizing that, and those percents started to add up. And before I knew it, my mind started hardening, and I started passing so many different people that I thought were so far above me. And then before I knew it, man, I became a common amongst the uncommon. You discuss in your book about hope. You tell the story and hope can be good, but it's not gonna be permanent.

And that what is permanent is understanding your own resilience from testing your own limits and getting confidence in knowing what you are personally capable of. And that's what you have to build, not just rely on hope. Does that apply to whatever the challenge is in your life?

Yeah, I mean, as we all know, a lot of us hope and we wish for things to happen. And I was the biggest person doing that when I was growing up, man. I wished my situation was different. I hoped for this miracle to happen. And the more I realized it was never going to happen, I started realizing I had to form something and I had to form belief. And this isn't like an after-school special belief. This is like, you know, not, you know, it's great for your mom and dad to say, believe in yourself. And after a while, you start to actually do that. But in those hard times, it doesn't work real well. So I started building

belief by doing these extreme hard, hard things. It's not just like running or swimming or whatever it may be. For me, starting off, it was just studying. It was just realizing, man, I battled depression real young and I had these highs and lows lows and I had to learn to manage these highs and lows and that was so difficult to do. It's hard to perform when you have no purpose at all. It is so difficult when you're fat, when you're out of shape, when you're depressed, when you have a hard time learning and you've been abused and you had all these hard times. You fluctuate on the happy times. You think about a million things you want to do. Oh, I want to get this and I want to get that.

And then on those bad times, you just want to survive. So I started really choking my life down and just focusing on one thing at a time so I could acquire that belief that I needed to attack all the things I attacked. So how does that play into the hard times, regret, shame, disappointment, failure? So many of us stay stuck there. And, you know, whether you overeat or you quit or you're like, well, that's it. It's never going to happen. Where does somebody need to look to find what gets you up and out of that place? Well, the problem that most of us have is we think that we're all alone. We think that we're the only ones going through all this stuff. I thought it. Most of us think

that if you're fat, which I was fat for a while, you think you're the only fat person in the world. Your vision becomes very narrowed. And what happened to me was all I did was I peeled back. I peeled back and I was able to get on top of a mountaintop in my head. And when you're high on that mountain, you have a great vantage point. And I was able to look down at the world and we are, all of us are jacked up. Some of us hide it better than others, but we're all jacked up. And once you realize that, you know, you got to come out of your shell. You got to accept who you are. You got to accept the demons that life gave you, that maybe you gave you. Whoever gave them to you, you got to accept that. You got to be able to look them in the mirror, look them in the eyes,

okay, I'm going to start fixing these things. But if you think that you're by yourself, the reality of your life becomes very, very horrible. And you're not. We are all jacked up. And once you realize that, man, you just, it's like, whatever. You don't even look at the crowd anymore. You look at your own race, you do your own race, you do your own thing. And you finally found out who you're supposed to be in this life. You know, you apply that to social media and every once in a while you'll throw in, in one of your videos, you know, whether it's because, you know, you've had a wave of people coming at you with, you know, with a bucket of hate or whatever it is, you talk about social media and how susceptible we are

to listening to people that we don't know. We don't even know that they really exist and how harsh the criticism can be. What does that mean? Well, that one's huge, man, because social media, I'm very fortunate. You know, I'm almost 48 years old and I came up at a time when there was no social media.

So you can just focus on on what you had to do that. That social media, man, it kind of draws you in and it makes you just all your feelings. A lot of your feelings come from that social media. And it's just a lot of young people and even older people. They live on that phone and the comments and looking at if you're fat, you're seeing skinny people who have gone through an airbrush, half of their badness out of them. Or if you're not real smart, you know, people only put up on social media what they're good at. They put up all the good times. They don't put the bad times. I put the bad times. But what you have to realize about

all these different things, you will never in your life meet a hater doing better than you. All these people are going on here hating you and disliking you. And you got to peel back from all that, man. We get sucked in like a vacuum and we can't see anything. You got to peel back and say, what kind of human being is able to do these things? They're in a bad spot, a much worse spot than you are. So you have to learn to study everything in life. Everything in life, you have to study. Study people. Most people are extremely weak, extremely weak. So they want to make you feel just like they do. And this is all science, man. It's all ABCD type stuff, man.

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it's not just the regular list of vitamins. It's the extras, okay? The adaptogens, the prebiotics, the probiotics that support your body's universal needs, gut optimization, immune support, stress management. That's what foundational nutrition is about. And these are the people at AG1 who've been doing the work to get it right. Okay. I tell friends, I tell family, I get no complaints. Okay. If you want to take ownership of your health, it starts with AG1. Try AG1. You get a free one year supply of vitamin D3K2 and five free AG1 travel packs. Okay. That's what happens with your first purchase. So make it. Go to drinkag1.com slash CCP. Drinkag1.com slash CCP. Check it out. Five million books sold in four years, independently published. Why was that so important to you?

And I know there's another metric that'll be interesting to book people out there. Goggins has more reviews of his book, Can't Hurt Me, which was his first book. He's got his second book out now called Never Finished, which has been invaluable to me. It comes with a workbook also. He has more reviews than Michelle Obama's book.

And that was like, you know, a gazillion million dollar publishing deal that they did there with marketing. Why was it so important for you to do it independently? Well, I almost, you know, went ahead and did a book deal, but I was sitting back and I spent a lot of time reflecting on my life. And the person that I made, you know, it didn't come easy. So I was willing to turn down, you know, a nice book advance and just go at it alone because I didn't want to sell my life to anybody. When you worked as hard as I did, I'd rather pay

than someone give me money for my rights to my life. That's how much it meant to me. So that's the bottom line. money for my rights to my life. That's how much it meant to me. So that's the bottom line. How important is it for people to understand that it has to be internal, that it has to start with you, that it has to be about what you can do with you and that, you know, systems and trainings and, you know, wanting to be part of a group and know that's all fine, but that change has to start inside first. Well, the inside is the most important thing, Chris, because there are so many times in my life growing up

I wanted to fit in and I wanted to be part of a group and I didn't have any want and I didn't have that desire. So when you're trying to fit in, when you're trying to be cool, when you're trying to be whatever the hell it is without having that internal dog, that fight, when things get hard in life, all you do is quit.

When you have that internal in you, like I've developed over a lot of years, this dog, it starts to get built up in you, this fight, this warrior. And when things get difficult, you may not make it, but you come back. You start to build a different voice in your head. That internal conversation, that internal strength, that internal dog, it starts to develop an internal voice. And while my voice in my mind for the first 24 years of my life was very weak, when I started to really build my insides, like my guts getting hard and everything about me getting harder, it developed a different voice. That voice of nurturing, like, oh, David, you came from an abused family. You came from this.

You came from that. It's okay. This dog started coming up where it's not okay. I wanted to be one of the one percenters, not the 99%. I realized I had one life to live and I have to live it. There's not two lives. There's one life. And all these things started happening to me. not two lives. There's one life. And all these things started happening to me. And then once that started happening, man, everything flipped. But that internal, it starts to build a voice in you that doesn't allow you to sleep in, doesn't allow you to take days off when you know that you're behind. It just keeps you in check throughout everything you're doing in life because it's not going to allow you to fail. But if you'll work on the inside of you, you will always have that nurturing voice that guides you where it's okay. It's always okay. And if I would have had that, it would

have been okay to stay 300 pounds doing what I was doing. So that endures everything. What flipped the switch for you? Because in reading the book, you know, you were heavy for a while, and then you lost like an amazing amount of weight in a very short amount of time. What flipped the switch? Well, I was haunted. I've been haunted since I was a young kid. I saw a lot of things I should have seen. I've seen a lot of, you know, I saw a lot of death.

I saw my mom get beat. And when you're going through this, you start to develop a lot of fear, fear of attacking life, fear of failure, fear of having big goals, big dreams. So I would dream really small. And all these things happen. And I was just afraid to face that, you know, we all have what it takes, but it's just not that easy. And I knew I had what it took, but I'm really big in visualizing. And I was able to visualize what it was going to take for me to be a Navy SEAL. What was it going to take for me to lose this weight? What was it going to take for me to be somebody I was proud of looking in the mirror?

me to lose this way? What was it take for me to be somebody I was proud of looking in the mirror? And after a while, if you start to work on the inside of you, that whole inside thing, that voice, like I said, it gets louder and louder and it becomes more and more haunting. And the more haunting it becomes, the more it doesn't allow you just to live your life, eat those donuts, not work out, working these mediocre jobs with mediocre money, living in a mediocre house and saying you're better than this. It's going to take a lot of damn work, a lot of hard work. And that's what happened to me. Over a period of time, that voice that haunted me got louder and louder and louder. Before I knew it, I couldn't sleep. And I had to start conquering all these things just to be at peace with myself.

And so it happened at 24 years of age. And I just have never, ever turned that voice off. It's just loud now. And that was so loud that I don't hear any other voice. But we have to do. We have to be better. We have more in us. Are you surprised by the success and the reception,

the people who come up to you on the street, not just because they want a picture, but they say, thank you, and how many books and how much reach. I mean, they got you in cartoons, landing on the moon, and you're running by saying, stay hard. The influence, are you surprised by it? And what does it mean to you? First of all, yeah, I'm very surprised by it. by it and what does it mean to you? First of all, yeah, I'm very surprised by it. It means the world to me. It's very humbling coming from where I came from. I didn't expect it. I didn't expect it at all. You know, I'll never forget when I was trying to get my book out there the first time and there were a few book companies that looked at me and said, man, you have a great story, but you know, you're a black guy that was fat, that lost some weight, and they were doing

all the algorithms and crap on 15 or 14, 13% of the world is African-American, and your story's not going to really touch the masses. And it was very humbling to hear all these things. And I wasn't trying to become some person that changed people's lives. And so, yeah, it's just very shocking and humbling to me that basically just hard work and outworking the hand I was dealt. I was dealt a horrible hand and outworked it. I outworked the hell out of it. And I'm very proud of that. Well, you should be. And it's an amazing inspiration. And it's not just inspiration of your story. It's the tools that you give people in your book, how to create their own story. As you say, 201 Paradise Road is where you grew up,

irony aside of the name of the street. And you say everybody's got a 201 Paradise Road, not that it's the same background of abuse you came through, but everybody's dealing with pain. All pain is personal, and the tools apply to all of us. I told you Goggins was no joke. It is amazing. And I'll tell you, Never Finished is an amazing book. You can really use it. And it gives you actionable ways

to take on goals in your life. So please, subscribe, follow. Thank you very much for being with me. Don't forget News Nation. Find it. Find it. 8 o'clock and 11 o'clock Eastern, all week long. Please, join the family.

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