The Rich Roll Podcast - You Can’t Hurt David Goggins: Going Beyond Motivation & Why Mindset Is Everything

Episode Date: January 1, 2019

“You have to go to war with yourself before you can find peace” David Goggins I can think of no better guest to usher in 2019 than the mighty one himself. Incontrovertibly the most inspirational person I have ever met, today David Goggins returns for his second turn on the podcast — a conversation that will catapult you into the new year with the tools and hard truth you need to chase huge dreams, shatter personal limits and transform your life wholesale. Often referred to as the hardest man alive, David is the only member of the US Armed Forces to complete SEAL training (including three Hell Weeks), the U.S. Army Ranger School (where he graduated as Enlisted Honor Man) and Air Force Tactical Air Controller Training. But David is perhaps best known for his superhuman feats of strength and ultra-endurance. After several of his friends died in a 2005 helicopter crash while deployed in Afghanistan, David honored their memory by tackling the most difficult endurance challenges on Earth to raise funds and awareness for the Special Operations Warrior Foundation, which provides college scholarships and grants to the children of fallen special ops soldiers. Hence began a most unexpected yet remarkably storied athletic career as one of the world's most accomplished endurance athletes. Highlights include: * 2005: ran 100 miles in under 24 hours on no training; * 2013: world record for most pullups in a 24 hour period (4,030); * 2007: 3rd place — Badwater 135 – a 135 mile ultramarathon across Death Valley widely considered to be the world’s most difficult foot race; * 2006: 2nd place — Ultraman World Championships, a double-ironman distance race widely considered to be the world's most difficult triathlon; * 2007: 1st place — 48-Hour National Championship endurance foot race, where he ran 203.5 miles, beating the previous record by 20 miles; and * 2007 – 2016 — additional top finishes at dozens of the world's most grueling endurance races, including The HURT 100, Leadville 100, Western States & more. But David’s greatest accomplishment isn't athletic. It's self-mastery. From day one, David has faced a concatenation of seemingly insurmountable obstacles – poverty, psychological and physical abuse, obesity, learning disabilities, asthma, sickle cell anemia, and even a congenital heart defect that often left him competing — and winning — on a mere fraction of his actual physical capabilities. It's a scenario that would have buried the best of us. And yet, against all odds, David conquered them all, and ultimately found a way out. It's the story of a man who transformed pain into obsession and, phoenix-like, rose from a state of utter desperation to take complete ownership of his life and total command of his mind to manifest a most extraordinary life. David's implausible journey is laid bare in his recently released memoir, Can't Hurt Me* — one of the most honest, powerful and impactful stories of hardship, redemption and personal perseverance I have ever read. Certain books instruct. Others inspire. But it's the rare read that holds the potential to reframe your sense of personal capability and completely change your life. This book does just that — a statement I don't make lightly. I highly suggest it. Enjoy, Rich

You must go to war with yourself before you find peace. So I'm trying to give you tools on how to do that. It's a hard journey. It's a real journey. It's a journey that's going to take you way outside of being comfortable. When you want to fit in with people so badly, normal people, no better than you, you do whatever you can to fit in. That's a bad place to be.

You lose yourself in trying to create a character that other people will accept. Like I've said a million times before, the most important conversation is the one you have with yourself. You wake up with it, you walk around with it, you go to bed with it. Eventually, you act on it. Sometimes you act on it good, sometimes bad. You got to change the internal dialogue. That's David Goggins, this week on The Rich Roll Podcast. The Rich Roll Podcast. Hey, everybody. How are you guys doing? What's happening? My name is Rich Roll. I am your host. This is my podcast. Welcome and welcome to 2019, a new year everybody. How you guys doing? How are you feeling?

Boy, do I have just the thing to usher in the new year. Goggins, the mighty one himself, he's here today. If you've been with me for a while on this podcast journey, then that name will surely ring a bell. This is a guy who's had a tremendous impact on me and my life. And in many ways, it was his example. I credit his example as inspiring me to enter the world of ultra endurance many years ago. And quite honestly, I'm really not sure I would have ever achieved the things that I have achieved as an athlete

had he not lit the path before me. I published my first conversation with David exactly two years ago on New Year's Day, 2016. And he's like a podcast star now, but that conversation was really his coming out party. It was his first real long-form podcast, and to date, it is by far my most popular and downloaded episode in the history of this show over the last six years by a long shot. Well, now he's back, and I gotta say, better than ever.

For those new or unfamiliar, David is, among many other things, the only member of the U.S. Armed Forces to complete SEAL training, including three hell weeks, as well as the U.S. Army Ranger School, where he graduated as enlisted honor man, and Air Force tactical controller training, which is unbelievable. which is unbelievable. But David is perhaps best known for his superhuman feats of strength, including setting a world record for most pull-ups in a 24-hour period, and for competing in an exhaustive list of the world's most difficult ultra-endurance challenges. Simply put, David is arguably the hardest human alive and quite possibly the most inspirational figure you're ever going to come across. And I say that without any shred of irony or hyperbole whatsoever. So picking up where we left off two years ago, he is here to blast you into 2019 in a couple of few. But first. a couple few, but first. We're brought to you today by recovery.com. I've been in recovery for a long time. It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety.

And it all began with treatment and experience that I had that quite literally saved my life. And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment. And with that, I know all too well just how confusing and how overwhelming and how challenging it can be to find the right place and the right level of care, especially because unfortunately, not all treatment resources adhere to ethical practices. It's a real problem. A problem I'm now happy and proud to share has been solved by the people at recovery.com, who created an online support portal designed to guide, to support, and empower you to find the

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I really do. And they have treatment options for you. Life in recovery is wonderful, and recovery.com is your partner in starting that journey. When you or a loved one need help, go to recovery.com and take the first step towards recovery. To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. We're brought to you today by recovery.com. I've been in recovery for a long time. It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety.

And it all began with treatment and experience that I had that quite literally saved my life. And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment. And with that, I know all too well just how confusing and how overwhelming and how challenging it can be to find the right place and the right level of care. Especially because, unfortunately, not all treatment resources adhere to ethical practices. It's a real problem. It's a real problem, a problem I'm now happy and proud to share has been solved by the people at recovery.com who created an online support portal designed to guide, support and empower you to find the ideal level of care providers to cover the full spectrum of behavioral health disorders, including substance use disorders, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, gambling addictions, and more. Navigating their site is simple. Search by insurance coverage, location, treatment type, you name it. Plus, you can read reviews from former patients to help you decide.

Whether you're a busy exec, a parent of a struggling teen, or battling addiction yourself, I feel you. I empathize with you. I really do. And they have treatment options for you. Life in recovery is wonderful, and recovery.com is your partner in starting that journey. When you or a loved one need help, go to recovery.com and take the first step towards recovery. To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. Okay, Goggins.

Without a doubt, David is one of the most remarkable people I've ever met. And what makes his testimony, his experience, his journey so powerful is everything that he has endured to face and overcome this unbelievable laundry list of life obstacles that are so unbelievable and seemingly insurmountable that it's astounding. Everything from asthma, sickle cell anemia, psychological and physical abuse, obesity, academic struggles, even a congenital heart defect that often left him competing and winning races on a mere fraction of his actual physical capabilities. David recounts his journey in vivid detail, technicolor detail, in his incredible new memoir that just came out. It's called Can't Hurt Me.

And I gotta tell you guys, this is one of the most powerful and impactful books about redemption and personal perseverance that I have ever read. If you pick up one book this January or this year, please make it be this book. Can't hurt me. I really think it holds the potential to change your life. And if not that, at a very minimum, reframe your personal sense of capability. I highly suggest the audiobook

version, which is read by his co-writer and my friend and former podcast guest, Adam Skolnick from RRP218. He is the author of the book One Breath about freediver Nick Mavoli, which you guys might remember. In any event, after every chapter, David and Adam engage in this off-the-cuff, free-form podcast conversation between the two of them, kind of breaking down what happened in the previous chapter and sort of anticipating what comes next. And I found that to be utterly compelling. So I highly suggest you check that out. In any event, picking up where we left off two years ago, this is, again, I got to say, one of the most powerful podcasts I've ever produced. It's a conversation about the primacy of purpose to cultivate your inner

voice. It's about passion and self-accountability. It's about the limiting beliefs that hold us back and the importance of mindset to overcome them. And it's about the embrace of suffering as a crucible for growth and self-knowledge. So welcome to 2019, people. It's time to torch complacency. It's time to get brutally honest with yourself, to embrace vulnerability, and as David would say, to callous the mind, to get comfortable with being uncomfortable, because your life is not some future event, people. Your life is now. So here's Goggins in all of his beautiful, unfiltered glory. All right, let's do it. Let's do it, man. Man, fucking Goggins. That is like the refrain throughout the audio book, man. Skolnick popping

in with just like after every chapter, like, man, Goggins. What the fuck? I mean, I thought I knew the story. Right. And I know a lot of it. Right. There's just so much more there, man. So much more, man.

Unbelievable. It's all surface, man. I only had an hour to talk to people in the podcast. You got to get the surface version. The book goes deep, dark into the sewer. Yeah. Tells you everything. It's an incredible accomplishment.

It's such an unbelievable document. It's going to inspire and catalyze a lot of growth in a lot of people, man. So first off, congratulations on getting this thing done. Thank you. It's no small thing. No, sir. And what's amazing about it, before we even get into the content of it, is that you made this decision to self-publish this book. Yes, sir.

Right now, it's at like number two or number three on Amazon of all books. Right, right. That just doesn't happen with a self-published book. And you've been able to do this without any mainstream media whatsoever. Like I did a Google search this morning. I wanted to see any hits that you had like in the last week or in the last day. You're not on the Today Show. You're not on Morning America. You didn't do any of that, man. This is all self-propelled DIY. And to go from that place to the very top, like selling the number of books that you're selling right out of the gate is just insane.

Right. It's nuts. There's got to be a lot of people in publishing looking at that going, what is going on here? Well, that's been the story of my life. I see something that's quite off, quite not the same, and that's what I go for. This book is exactly who I am as a person. Exactly the way I did this book is how I've done almost my entire life, is I see what is not the norm, what's impossible, what all the theorists say you shouldn't be doing this. That's the wrong way to go. And I'm like, hmm, let me see if I can pull this shit off.

Yeah, let me go over here, man. Let me see if I can pull this shit off. Was that part of the challenge, the decision? I mean, it seems to me that the decision to self-publish was generated more by a desire to really, you know, own your story. That's it, 100%. There was no driven message with me trying to prove people wrong or whatever. It was 100% by me wanting to own my life. There's a lot of people I know that I speak with right now that have nice book deals out there. And the people who buy their book, whatever, Publishing House, they can't even talk some of this stuff, you know, like in speaking engagements. And I'm like, what, you can't even talk your story?

And somebody's like, no, like I got to make sure that they're aware of it. And I'm like, no, man, I want to own 100% of the suffering I went through in my life. I don't want anybody telling me, hey, Goggins, you can't say this. I will lose my shit. What, I suffered this badly and you're going to fucking

tell me I can't say this? There've been all kinds of problems with that one. So I made sure that I wanted to own all of Can't Hurt Me and own all of my own life story. So that's what it really is all about. Well, you really have ownership, not only of your own story, but your ability to tell it. Right. And as somebody who's like a member of the ultra community, I remember, and I think we talked about this last time, you kind of disappeared for a couple of years there from around like, I don't know what it was, like 2009, 2010 to about 2013. You had like a website and a blog that would get updated once in a while. And I would check in and try to see what you were up to. And you just went totally dark. I went ghost, man. Yeah. And I didn't know about the heart stuff. There was something about like,

oh, there's a health thing that you're dealing with. And I thought, oh, this guy's just disappeared. But that was the recruiting era, right? Where you were just on the road telling your story and putting in the reps on how to tell your story. So it was the recruiting era for me when I started becoming like the Navy SEALs needed more blacks in the SEAL teams. And that's what people don't understand. Like, you know, why did you become a recruiter in the SEAL teams? I was one of the few black guys, you know, and I had already done Badwater.

So I got a little bit, you know,-bill notoriety for doing Badwater. And so the Navy SEALs were like, oh, my God. We could use this guy to try to get the 1% of the African-Americans in Navy SEALs up to maybe 2%. And so I hit the road and started doing that. But I also hate—I'm not a big guy on social media. So I was actually happy to kind of pull away from it. You know, I'm just not big on that stuff. Even today, I'm just not a big fan of it, man.

I'm a big introvert. I get a lot of my strength from being introverted. And going out there and doing what I do is very, all this is very difficult for me, man. All of it. Yeah. It's funny when you say you're introverted because you're so good, you know, when it comes to sharing your story and it's so compelling. And, you know, there's a lot of people out there like they're quote unquote like influencers or whatever.

It would be like, wow, like this guy's got, I don't know, what do you have, like 600,000 plus on Instagram or something like that. Yeah, and for somebody who's, you're averse to it, you don't like it. You hate it. You only post once in a while. You don't really advertise what you're doing at all, but you've grown this huge following of people who are super interested in what you're doing. Well, I think it's important to do things you don't like. And I was very ashamed in my life story for a long time. I didn't want to go out and tell anybody shit about me.

So that's why I had two people. I created one David Goggins and one Goggins. Right. And I didn't want people to know that I had all these issues. But after a while, people start to give you these different taglines. You're superhuman. You're amazing. I'm like, you fuckers don't know anything about me, man.

I'm this insecure kid. I started realizing there's a lot of people out here who are going through a lot of problems that I once tapped into. I had a whole bunch of issues growing up. And I felt compelled to this, you know what? You got to start sharing this stuff, man, because people see where you're at today. They see where you're at today. They see the man you are today, this hard rock, hard human being. Show these people where you come from. Right. Show these people it's possible.

It's funny when you're reading the book, like once you get into the later chapters, like six, seven, or eight, all the way to the end, you start to forget chapters one and two. That's right. And you start thinking this guy is a superhuman. And then you got to remind yourself like, oh man, look where he came from. Right. I actually do that in the audio book. In the audio book, while Adam's reading, we have a moment where we stop because we're like six or seven, six, seven, eight, where I start doing all these crazy feats and start going way beyond human limits for myself. And I tell people, while you're hearing this, I know you guys have already forgotten about how I came up.

Don't forget the torture I endured mentally and physically in my own mind going through all this shit. So don't ever forget that. So people forget that so quickly when they get to that seven, eight, nine, ten chapters. So it's quick. Yeah. We should just mention the audio book. I mean, the book is amazing, but the audio book is next level. And part of that is because you guys kind of broke the paradigm here.

You made this somewhat risky decision to have Adam read most of the book. And we can get into the reasons behind that, which I think are well considered. But then after each chapter, you and Adam break it down podcast style, like informally, where you just freestyle on what that chapter was all about. And that just brings it to life in this technicolor way, which makes it just such a compelling experience. Well, everything I do, I try to do my very best. And now that I'm out here trying to share this story with people. I want to be so real and so fucking authentic to the point where it was embarrassing to me. As I was writing some stuff and I was giving it to Adam and we were going back and forth, I'm like, man, I'll talk to my fiance. Do I really want

people to fucking know this about me? But that's the power, man. That's the strength that you have to summon to be that vulnerable because that's how people are going to be able to emotionally connect. Exactly. When they look at what you've done in Badwater and all the buds and all that kind of stuff, it becomes difficult for people to relate to that. But when you have the strength and the fortitude to share those parts of your life that do embarrass you or provoke shame in you, that's the real shit. I had to show people I was human. People didn't think I was human. They thought I came from outer space, man, from some spacecraft and shit,

and landed down here and just formed Goggins from the rocks and the soil of the earth. No, that's not how it is, man. So I said, I'm going to share a secret with you all. Well, in one of the recaps, you tell Adam writing this book was the hardest thing you've ever done. And as somebody who's done a lot of hard shit, that was a surprising thing to hear. Well, looking in the mirror at yourself, because I did a really good job by creating this guy I'm now. So I can just go by and just live by this guy here. This is who I am. Do you think of it as like this, because you refer to yourself in the third person all the time. Because you refer to yourself in the third person all the time.

It's like this character that you're trying to aspire to be that's distinct from you. You create this division. How does that work? It's a big division because when I talk to people, I see where I'm at today, but I know where I come from. And it's kind of hard to almost separate that. I'm almost not in a way I'm kissing my own ass, but I'm amazed at what a human being can actually do. So when I start talking to myself in the third person,

it's strictly because I know that I literally made this human being out of just like a whole bunch of scraps. And I wasn't a mechanic. I wasn't a carpenter. out of just like a whole bunch of scraps. And I wasn't, you know, I wasn't a mechanic. I wasn't a carpenter. So I didn't know how to do any of this shit. You know, I wasn't trained in how to build a human being from nothing. You know, like my mom didn't train me. My dad didn't train me.

Life didn't train me. Well, life did train me. Life did, yeah. Life did train me, correction. And I started putting this scrap metal together. I'm like, I wonder what the fuck's going to happen. You know, the first year I tried to do it, it was all fucked up. And after a while, I started learning more and more and more through pain and suffering. I started learning so much about stuff.

Before I knew it, man, I built this beautiful car. And I'm like, how the fuck did I do that? And I knew how to do it because I have all the tools. Through all the failure I went through trying to build this person who's Goggins. Yeah. And that was something I came across loud and clear, which is it's not like you develop this toolbox and then everything worked out. No. It's like there's so many ups and downs and highs and lows, and you're constantly getting knocked down again. A lot of Home Depot shopping for that toolbox, brother.

Yeah. And I think the real gift that's built into this whole thing is how you reframe vulnerability. We tend to think of vulnerability as a weakness or somebody who's soft, and you embody it in a completely different structure to show people that it is strength. If you want to be hard and you want to be strong, vulnerability and open-mindedness are the keys to that kingdom. You said it perfectly there. The one thing that made me who I am today is being vulnerable, is breaking myself down to the absolute rock bottom and being able to tell people who I am. And that's how I fixed it. Literally, you know, look somebody in the eyes. You know what, man? I have a whole bunch of character problems, character flaws. I've lied about this. I've

cheated here. I'm insecure here. This isn't the real me. I lied to you about that. I wanted your acceptance in life. All those things happen. But the thing about it is that we get judged so quickly by who we are. We don't know. We don't go to where it happened. You know, life created this person, me. Life created me to be this fucked up person that I was back in the day. And I had to realize, man, that's okay, man.

It's not my fault. Now I got to go back and fix this shit though. So a lot of this isn't your fault why you do some things you do, why you feel the way you feel, but no one's coming back to save your ass. You have to go back to where the shit started, wherever that place is for everybody and have the courage to go back there and start fixing what broke you and that's and that's why i was like hey i'm fucked up i'm gonna go back and fix this though you got to be honest with yourself 100 about where you're at 100 people don't like that oh it's ugly yeah and what's funny about it is that as you're trying to fix yourself and dig yourself out of this deep hole that life society and you helped you helped also those people who you saw down

there in that hole who were there with you who are your friends and people who you counted on because you meet the people in the same situation that you're in in life those people become your friends and second you try to get out of that situation become better those people in that in that grave in that dungeon is yanking at your heels man saying get the fuck back oh no get no come on back here, motherfucker. Yeah. You ain't going to make me feel like shit by you getting out of this hole. Who the fuck do you think you are?

So I get that all the time now. People would constantly remind me of who I used to be back in the day. And they always come out of the woodworks, man. That's still happening? You know what? When you come from a small, small town, and you come from a place that a lot of people don't want to come out of it and get out of it and all you want to do is become somebody, when you have small town mentality is a real mentality. You've got to be able to get out and let your mind see open mindedness. Because a small town, what it does to you is it closes your mind Completely closes your mind not everybody. This isn't everybody a lot of people

You have to be able to go out there and create open-mindedness. You need space You need space to see the world like a lot of racism a lot of a lot of ignorance in the world It comes from people not being out and seeing other things seeing other people seeing all kind of shit That's why we judge so harshly. Because our minds are so closed to the reality of life. Period. Have you been back to Brazil? I went back to Brazil a couple times.

And I have nothing wrong with Brazil. Because once again, you can't, another thing about growth is you can't hold on to hate. You can't hold on to hate. And see, once you take a different step. So I had to take a step out of my life because once you're in that hell, that's all you see is what's in front of you. When I stepped out of it, I saw Brazil very differently. There were a lot of great people in Brazil. Some of the best people I knew were from Brazil.

But when you're in hell, all you see is the little patch in front of you of the kids that are calling you nigger. Or the people that spray painted nigger were going to kill you on your car. People put that shit in your locker. People put that shit on your notebook in Spanish class. That's all you see. You didn't see that, my God, a lot of people fucking like me here. So once you take a step back and see the reality of the true ignorance that you're dealing with from a small group of people, that's when you get growth. Because I went through a phrase in the book, I talked about, man, I was all about

black and only black when I was a junior in high school because I was so beat down. I was the most ignorant I've ever been in my fucking life when I went there. I totally took everything, all the hurt, all the pain, and just put it in one fucking filter. I got to find people who look just like me and act just like me to find acceptance. That when you were doing the crazy haircuts and turning your pants around. Watching Malcolm X video every damn night when I went home and shit. So the last time you were here, we kind of recapped your story chronologically, and I don't want to spend a lot of time on that, but there's a lot of new people listening. So I

think it's worthwhile to kind of catch people up on exactly who is David Goggins and where you were, where you came from, what you endured, and how you arrived at this place. Is there a way to do that concisely? I can do it pretty quick, I guess. I was born in Buffalo. My dad was on skating rinks and owned bars. And he was a very insecure guy. He was an alcoholic. He used to get women for favors. So my dad, I'm not saying he was a pimp. I always say he's a pimp because that's how I look at it. My mom said, the proper way to say this is that your dad used to get women and he would exchange women for favors. So there you go. That's pretty much a pimp. He was a pimp, right? He was a fucking pimp. So basically, that's my dad. He was a guy that

didn't care much about anything but himself. But he was kind of a baller in your community, right? Knew OJ Simpson big time, knew all the Buffalo Bills. Him and Rick James were best friends. Wow. So we had two different sides. It was the side that everybody saw, which was the side of, man, your dad is so damn cool, man. He's awesome.

And we lived on Paradise Road. The second that door was shut in that house, it was game on. The real him would come out. It was a perfect Jekyll and Hyde. So when you're born into that as a young kid and like you're getting beat for no reason you know like you know i'm not weapons are weapons man yeah but this guy would beat you for no reason just because he was drunk just because he saw you whatever it's like kind of like an ike turner character ike turner probably on on steroids Right. So that's who he was. And he was a perfect person for psychological warfare.

The beatings were horrible, but the mind torture was the worst. He got so deep in my head as a young kid, and that really fucks up your foundation. You know, when you're born, man, there's some sensitive years in there, man, where your brain starts to develop and starts to give you self-esteem, courage, confidence, all those things. And my dad was stripping that away from everybody. And when you see your mom, the worst thing to do is when you see your mom getting beat senseless at a young kid. That shit scars you permanently. I mean, she was like a prisoner to this guy. And what you guys had to do to escape and get away from him is insane. So she was 19 when she went there,

and she was an innocent 19-year-old. And she came from a great family, and she met this man. And totally just, it was brutal. It was very sadistic, the way she was tortured by him and the way my brother and myself were. And that broke me and my brother up. My brother loved my father a lot. He saw something very different than I saw. Because whenever my mom and I would get beat, my brother, I'm not calling him a coward by any means. He handled it very different than I did. He would go in his room. He didn't want to see the beatings. I would protect my mother. So in that, I saw a lot more of the violence. I was trying to protect her.

And me trying to protect her, I really got beat. So when you're constantly in that battle and that struggle and your brother's going in a different room because he didn't want to be part of this shit. He hated it. And he loved family. You know, he loves family. And I became the person like, hey, man, I'm not about it. And you had to shoulder the responsibility, this idea within you that you were responsible for making sure that your mom would be safe. And that was hard for an eight-year-old kid because when we moved to that small town in Brazil, Indiana, I had a learning disability.

I was stuttering. I was battling so much shit that i never even told my mom about because i because she was battling her own demons so at eight years old i'm looking for comfort and i'm like hey don't bother your mom with shit you were not the man of the house and i started becoming real protective of my mother at a young age so i whatever you're going through man you're on your fucking own you're not gonna're not going to tell your mom shit. And she ended up finding out later through the school systems and through me failing and through me, you know, all these issues I went through. She found out a lot. But, you know, I kept as much as I could from her, man.

And that really was a hard task for me to raise yourself mentally when you're already in the deepest, darkest dungeon of all time. And I think that's where I started really creating myself. I had to really start creating a certain pattern, a certain process, a certain kind of indestructible toolbox to handle my life. Well, you were on this trajectory to nowhere pretty quick. But the kind of inciting incident that starts to shift your trajectory is this Air Force guy that comes into your life, right? Like you develop this obsession with the military. Right. And then you meet this dude who survived that parachuting.

Right. It was nuts, man. Parachuting gone very wrong and you become obsessed with this guy. And that, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but that seems like the first sort of glimmer of hope that you might find your way in a different path. So like I talk about a lot, it started off with the Rocky and Rambo movies. Those were kind of like my fathers when I was coming up. But then I finally met this guy named Scott Guerin, this guy that fell off it. He had a parachute accident. A guy crashed through his parachute and he fell 13 13,000 feet pretty much to his death because his parachute collapsed. And he fell 120 miles an hour to the ground. I mean—

That picture in the book of him. It's disgusting, right? And so he hit the ground, and I met him a couple years later at this CAP, Civil Air Patrol camp. And I'm sitting there, and no kid was, like, amazed by him. You know, I was like, okay, this is a great story. I'm a kid. Let's go. I'm sitting there.

He comes out, and I was amazed by Rambo. Like, at a young age, I was like, oh, my God, this is the real Rambo. He came out. He had, you know, he got his throat cut open to open up his airway. A trach. So I saw he got trached, and I saw all these different things. I was like, my God, he came out talking all like Clint Eastwood, and he shared his story, and he's all hardcore.

I started following this guy, but he didn't know I was following him. So for a week long, he did push-ups and flutter kicks, and I was like, man, that is the real Rambo. Why do you think it connected with you and not with the other kids? What was it inside of you that was obviously searching for somebody like that? I was looking for strength my entire life. I didn't have any. I was a really weak kid. My dad beat the living shit out of me and took every... I was strong as a young kid, but me protecting my mom for so many years in that house, my dad made me very afraid because he beat the

shit out of me every time I went at him. So in that, every man wants courage. Every man wants strength. At least this one does. So I found it in every way possible. And when I see a strong guy, I was like, okay, maybe he can teach me. So he didn't know anything about me. So time went on. I left school. And then this guy was in my mind. We had zero money, man. At one time, we lived in a $7 a month place, government subsidized apartments. Now we live in like a $200 place at this time.

I searched. I went on a $500 phone bill. And back then, dude, and having no money, my mom wanted to kill me. I was in search of Scott Guerin. No Google, no internet. No Google, no nothing. You're just randomly calling up bases. Air Force bases, man. Calling up Air Force bases, man. Hey, do you know what Scott Guerin, what do you mean? Who's Scott Guerin? I'm like, he's a

pararescue man. A what? A pararescue man, there's not a lot of them. I started getting, okay, there's a PJ base here, a pararescue base here. I started tracking down pararescue, there's not a lot of them. So I started getting, okay, there's a PJ base here, a pararescue base here. So I start tracking down pararescue bases. Finally, Key West, Florida. He's a school instructor down there in Key West, Florida. I leave like a message.

He calls back, gets a hold of my mom. I'm like, I cannot believe this guy called me back. My first question to him was, hey, man, can I come stay with you for a week? He's like, who the fuck are you, man? He didn't know who the fuck I was. The guy let me come stay with him for a week. And that was you were a senior in high school? I was a junior in high school.

It was in my junior year pretty much. It's pretty amazing that he was open to that. He was open to it. I think he said about four words to me in the entire week we we pt together and i need to hear a word from him he you know you know he didn't talk a lot he was an instructor i would i would go to school or to um scuba school with him he would instruct i sit on the couch for 10 hours sit in the lounge on the fucking couch for 10 hours he come back pick me up we go for a run he go home we ate fish every fucking day because we had to go out in the ocean,

like I would go lobster hunting. I hate the fucking water. I was scared to death, but this guy went in, so I'm going in. And I left there with just one big thing. That's what I want to be. I want to be a guy like that. Yeah, this desire within you to find like a strong, positive male role model for your life. Right. I was looking hard, man. Yeah. But it wasn't easy getting into, getting, you know, following that path for you. No, it was the hardest thing I've done in my life. Being a pararescue man, trying to be a pararescue man, there was a lot of things I didn't know about. And not having a mentor, not having, you know, Scott was there. He really wasn't. You know, I met him for a week.

I saw him maybe a couple of times and I started bucking the shit out of him. He was a busy guy, had a family. So I was back on my own and I did the best I could. And trying to be a pararescue man, I finally passed the ASVAB test after taking it several times. And, you know, when you cheat your whole life in high school and elementary school, I had about a fourth grade reading level. I talk about that a lot in the book. I had to learn so much school in six months. That's when I really developed

my work ethic. People think it's from running. No, it's not from seals. It's not from running. It was from the countless hours teaching myself how to fucking read and write. I had a tutor for one hour. One hour every single week is all we could afford. So for six months, I saw a tutor one hour a week.

All the rest was on me. My mom was working three jobs. She was never home. I sat at this fucking table. I'm like, I have to get in the military. military. The whole book is really about mindset. That is the whole game. And I would agree that people look at you and they want to talk about bad water and all these races that you've done, you know, eight, 100 milers in eight weeks and all this insanity. But really, this is all a product of hardening your mind, callousing your mind, to use your phrase. And throughout the book,

what really, you know, makes it stand out is that there are lessons throughout. Like, this is a book in which it would be easy to think that David Goggins is the hero, but the reader is the hero, which is why you made this decision to reference what we were talking about earlier, to have Adam read it, because you wanted the reader to see themselves in this own journey. And you have these chapters, or after every chapter, you have these challenges and takeaways for people to use to change their own mindset. But even woven into the narrative, you're breaking away from the story to say, look, this is what you got to do. This is what I did. This is how you do it. And the first one of these really is the accountability mirror,

right? Which you still use. But what I didn't realize was that you developed that when you were like a junior in high school, you started doing that. But it's not like, but what I didn't realize was that you developed that when you were like a junior in high school. You started doing that. Yeah. But it's not like, oh, I did the accountability mirror and then everything started working out for me. No, it wasn't like it was a fix it all. No, it was a starting point to start holding myself accountable. And how that came to be, man, my mom got a letter from school and this is when I had to reveal myself and all my secrets.

mom got a letter from school and this is when I had to reveal myself and all my secrets. The secret came out, man, that I wasn't going to school, that I had flunked most of my classes. I had my report card in there for everybody to see, one of them, and it was revealed. Lots of T's and F's in that. Yeah, it was a nice report card. Thanks a lot, Rich. I appreciate it. You put it in there, man. I put it in there, man, but you have to talk about it right now.

It was, yes, a very embarrassing report card. And she was like, what is this? And this was like, she didn't see any report cards in my life. And at this time, she was frustrated. Not with me, but with life. Well, you had doctored that other report card, right? I doctored so much crap, but she didn't really see that one. But I doctored all my report cards.

And this is when I had to reveal myself. And she was like, you see that one. But I doctored all my report cards. And this is when I had to reveal myself. And she was like, you know what, man? You're going to flunk out. And that was the conversation. We're like, hey, we got to do something. You know, you're going to fail. She had her own demons, her own problems.

And that's when I went into the bathroom. And I was like, my God, dude, this is a harsh reality. Your mom is like, you're done. And I'm like, you are on your own. And the ASFAB was really the first real challenge where you tried to show up for something 100%. Right. That was my first real challenge. And what I love about the book is there's the grand, huge challenges and accomplishments, but what I find most inspiring are just the small little things, like these little details. Like when you've left that test and then you're in the car and then you go back in.

It's like things like that that really touched me. That was actually trying to be a Navy SEAL. That was a different test. Right. So that was a very emotional moment for me. And I'm actually there right now in my head talking to you. I remember that moment like it was yesterday. I was a fat guy trying to be a Navy SEAL now, and my life had come to this crossroads.

I'm like, man, you have to go right. And no one was going right. Everybody was going left. I'm like, you have to go right. And to know the pain and suffering I was about to endure by going right, the amount of accountability and failure I was going to witness and suffer by myself alone on this journey, it was daunting. So when I finally got to the ASVAB test and I was taking it for my very last time to get into the SEAL teams or to try to even try out,

they weren't supposed to tell me my score. And I went back out to my car after I took it. I was on some computer test, and I didn't know how to use a computer. I was wigging out about that shit because the first time I took it, it was like some notebook. You open a Scantron sheet, and you bubble it in with a number two pencil and shit, and you turn it in. I saw a computer, and I was like, oh, fuck.

What the shit? Oh, my God. I'm like, it's on a computer? So I wigged out there. And I had to get a 50 on mechanical comprehension. And this was like the third time you'd taken the test, right? This is my second time. So I took it three times for the Air Force and twice for the Navy.

So this is my second time for the Navy. And they're like, hey, this is it, man. You know, you're done. You're too old. You have a limited amount of time to lose 106 pounds, and you have to take this ASVAB again. There's so many things that's crunching down on my head. And so when I took the test,

I knew I had a good enough score to get in the Navy, but to be a SEAL, I had to score high on mechanical comprehension, a 50. So the first time, I got a 44 on mechanical comprehension. So I'm sitting there, and I take the test, and I hit send. Send meant it's out in outer space somewhere. But I knew it popped up at the administrator's desk.

And he's not supposed to tell me shit. He tells you sit down, take your test, and you leave. I walked out, got in my car, or I was walking around the car, whatever. I was like, I got to go in and find out, man. So I went in. I literally sat there. Everybody's taking their test, and I'm begging this guy. And he's telling me, I can't tell you shit.

It's against government. It's against rules, everything. He opened it up. He goes, okay, man. He said, you got a 65. I said, no, man. I didn't know I got a mechanical comprehension. And he scrolled the page down, and it was exactly a 50.

And I literally, like, what came through my body, because it's easy to talk about it now to you, but no one knew the time and energy I put into getting that 50. It was pretty amazing. Yeah. I mean, what did that represent for you, like the opportunity for a new life to finally get away? It represented an opportunity for a new life, but the thing about it is I'm trying to be a Navy SEAL.

At this time, I was still 200 and some odd pounds. I still had more weight to lose. So think about this. I put everything on David Goggins to be a Navy SEAL. It's like going to the craptail with your last $1,000. And you say, you know what? I'm going to the crap table with your last thousand dollars. And you say, you know what? I'm going to put everything on this fucking, on black.

And hopefully I'll win. If not, I'm broke. I put my whole life, a guy that was scared of the fucking water, a guy that could fucking tell himself how to read and write, on being one of the hardest motherfuckers on the planet.

Think about that shit. A guy that came from nothing. I put my whole life, and I'm going to go out here and put everything on David fucking Goggins to be a Navy SEAL. Not to go be a fucking, you know, Boy Scout or some shit.

A Navy SEAL. And I look at that, and I did all this shit just to get the opportunity to succeed. That's what people don't fucking understand, man. If people see the end result, I remember that guy saying, my God, man, I can't believe what the fuck I've just done.

I put everything, ruined relationships, ruined this, ruined that, put everything on the fact I have to become someone in this world or I'm no good for anybody. And where does that come from? Where did that compulsion, that drive? It comes from a disgusting place of not being fulfilled in your life, of afraid of dying, having never accomplished anything. That's a fear that some people run away from, that's a fear that some people run away from, that people don't want to face. When you have a real fear of dying and being just another person, that I live to pay the bills,

I made $1,000 a month. This is my life. I spray for cockroaches, man. If that makes you feel good, that's great. It didn't make me feel good. I wanted to the first time in my life, after 26 years, it was 24, 25, wherever I was, I wanted to feel good about myself. And that was the ticket for me. Yeah. I mean, you have this huge reservoir, this capacity to leverage pain and circumstance to drive change within yourself. To be able to not be a victim, but to look at pain as your friend, as a catalyst for growth. And I think there's a lot of people out there, look, if you're in enough pain, that's going to move the needle for you. There's a lot of people out there that are in just enough pain where they're willing to just settle for what they have because they're not in enough pain to change. And the fear of change outweighs the pain of their daily existence.

You know the one gift I have with all that being said, what you just said there, is I have the ability to see the end before the beginning even begins. And what that means is I know that to get to the very end, I can see it right now. So before I went to Bud's, and I was losing all this fucking weight and shit, I saw myself walking across the fucking stage

at 191 fucking pounds, because that's where I had to get to get into the door. I saw myself six months, a year later, whatever it was going to take me to do, I saw myself walking across that stage, getting that fucking certificate of graduation from Bud's. And I was able to be there at 300 fucking pounds. And that feeling that I was nowhere near that fucking feeling, I was able to put myself there a million times every fucking day.

And that feeling of like, my God, that is going to feel fucking amazing. That's what made me suffer. That's what allowed the pain to be real and say, this is worth it. I want to feel for this fucking next 18 months. It took me 18 fucking months to finally become a Navy student, to finally just get through butts. 18 months. It's six months. It took me 18. That's what woke me up every fucking morning was I'm gonna put myself through this much fucking pain and suffering for a few seconds so it is a Few seconds of joy and so fucking worth it man That's what people don't get so I'm able to put myself at the finish line

You know, I have no finish line But at the finish line of an event before I even start the motherfucker to say, how are you going to fill it into this? Well, visualization is one of the challenges. And part of that is not just visualizing success or living in the reality of achieving what you're setting out to achieve, but also visualizing how you're going to navigate all the obstacles that are going to get thrown in your path. Right. Visualizing is my biggest tool of life. That's why I've been able to put myself in cold water, put myself in a 100-mile race millions of times before I've done it. And I'm able to go through the race and see how I'm going to feel at mile 50, almost to the exact feeling. Right. So when it comes up, it's no surprise.

It's no surprise. I've already done this a million times. And that's the one thing I practice and practice and practice and practice overnight. But also, the most important thing is I practice that feeling of accomplishment that I'm going to have and it's all sitting down with. the ASVAB story is that in addition to having to pass this test and get that 50, you also had to lose 100 pounds in like, what, like 30 days or some crazy short period of time? It was less than three months. Right. Okay. Three months. But you compartmentalize these two tasks and say, look, the first thing I got to do is I got to pass this test because the weight doesn't matter

if I don't get that 50. And you shelved or put off losing the weight to focus on the academic end of it until you completed that hurdle. And then you looked at the weight stuff. I'm like that now to this day. And you still got it done. Yeah. But it's like being focused on one thing at a time. I have to be very present in everything I do.

Like right now, I'm with Rich Roll. I'm not thinking about shit, but Rich Roll. And what the fuck's coming out of your mouth right now. That's what gives me a huge advantage in life, especially today in this day and age with so much shit going so fast and everybody wants to keep everything going, everything up and everything. I want to be the greatest multitasker of all time, not me. If I put my 100% into what's in front of me, I will destroy it. If I'm out here just multitasking and shit, I'm going to half-ass everything I do. So it is the most important thing in the world to me is being focused at the task at hand.

And it's getting harder and harder to do that because there are so many distractions and it's so easy to distract yourself. Yes, it is. You don't ever have to be bored again with these things in our pockets. No, but the one thing I'm most scared of in the world is losing touch with the best thing in the world is your mind, your mindset, how you can picture yourself, how you can focus, how you can drive, how you can put yourself in so many situations to get out of it because those headphones we listen to, those phones that we Google to find information, there's so many situations in my life where that shit's not going to help me. It's not going to help me. And you're able to just turn that off. So fast because I know what's helped me. None of that stuff has ever helped me.

None of that stuff has ever helped me. What has helped me has been me alone, getting my shit together and being accountable for who I'm not and who I want to be. That's the only thing that's helped me. So you get the opportunity to become a Navy SEAL and then you end up going through buds three times. It's like-

Yeah, Merry Christmas. I got lucky, man. Unbelievable. And the stories of what that entailed are like so vivid, man. It's unbelievable. Well, I was very fortunate to go through three times. And not in a sadistic way, in a life-changing, growing way. I found out so much about myself through going through that training three times.

And I went through the hardest part of the training three times. So first phase is a crucible, man. And that's where I was at for three times. I spent most of my time in buds in first phase. In the hell week. In the hell weeks. And being in that grind. And in that grind, I got a time to examine myself. I caught the live autopsy and also examine other people because I was really good about putting people way above me because I wasn't shit. I was never nobody. So for me to be on the same stage as these great wannabe Navy SEALs and bus trainers, like, my God, you guys are amazing. I actually got here with you all. Thank you so much for allowing me into play. But as I was there for

so long, I got a really good chance to sit back because now the cold water is just water now. It's no longer cold anymore. Your mind starts to change. They say get in the water, most people think about it. For you, it became my life. So I started learning that if you start to change your mindset versus it being like, oh my God, this sucks, I became a professional bud student. So I wasn't going to leave until I graduated. So I started realizing if this is my home, this is what I am, I had to always reset the bar. I had to reset my new norm. There always had to be a new norm.

So one thing we don't do is we don't have a new norm. My new norm is you get up every fucking morning at four o'clock and you suffer. This is your new norm. That became my new fucking life. Most people want to get out of it. I said, no, motherfucker, this is your new life. This is who you are. Your new norm is you wake up and you suffer. And I started realizing if that's my mentality this shit ain't hard anymore you're fucking new normal you wake up you get in the fucking cold water you're gonna be here to the shits fucking done whenever they say you're out you get out so my new norm so I I do that now today my new

norm now is if I'm doing a 200 mile run your new norm now man you fucking are doing 200 fucking miles the The Roger that mentality. That's it, man. So at what point during this Bud's experience do the instructors start to take notice of you in a way that separates you from the pack? Is it SBG or these guys that are like, they're starting to go, hey man, this dude's cut a little bit differently. They're starting to go, hey, man, this dude's cut a little bit differently. SBG noticed it.

He noticed it in my second Hell Week because I really, and this is no lie, I'm very open about my life, so I'm open about this. I really started to enjoy the fact of seeing what the human mind was capable of and seeing that what is so horrendous, there's so much joy and glory in this shit. And when you see other alpha males like, you know, SBG in the book, he was one of the hardest guys in the SEAL teams. He's looking at you like, what the fuck is wrong with you? Right.

You know, like— Well, they start testing you. Like, they're like, let's play this out, right? And there's that story where he makes you swim out to the boat on my own Wednesday night and that fucked me up because I like my knee was you know it was broken it was it was fucked up bad and it's Wednesday of hell week and all the boat crews are past the surf zone and I just got a tourdoll shot in my knee because I'm not going to I'm let's go man we're going and um it's fucking like it's real late at night and it was fucking raining and the class is past the surf zone and I'm still not a big fan of the fucking water the ocean is very unforgiving

and I had this big life jacket on and and SBG's like, hey, follow me, man. So we run a mile down to where the boat crews were at, out past the surf zone. I'm thinking, hey, we can wait for them to come on in. He goes, hey, man, get a chem light. He broke a chem light, put on my hat, and said, go out and fucking get them. And I was on my own. There was no, like, swim buddy, so I can buzz you if you're a swim buddy. Yeah.

And when he said that to me, I said, are you? And my mom said, this motherfucker is joking. He's got to be joking, man. It's Wednesday. He must have been thinking, I'm going to break this guy. This is going to be the moment. I think that's what it was. But now we're pretty tight now. And he said, no, that wasn't it at all.

He said, you're one of the only people in my tenure as a buds instructor that I've ever done that with. He said, I knew a person like you would have found that as a challenge. And I had to dig deep because I didn't want to look at him and say, hey man, I'm not doing that shit. Even though I think I could have because there was no swim buddy. You know, you don't go out there Wednesday night after like 80 hours of hell week

and you're like seeing stars and shit like during the daytime. You're seeing boats that aren't out there. You're halluc hallucinating you're all over the place he sent me out there and I was like okay this is my time to show one of the best motherfuckers in the world that is on so I got my shit man I went out there and did it and it was uh it was uh I I detail it well in the book but it was uh it was a moment that I started realizing I'm starting to separate myself now. Yeah. So there's two kind of themes that emerge from that.

One is this idea of taking souls. Right. This sense that, hey, I came from nothing and I'm here amongst the best, and then starting to realize like, hey, these people are human. Right. How can I get my tactical advantage? Right. And you explore this idea of taking souls, which essentially is going places no one else is willing to go to fuck with their heads.

That's it. Right? That's it. To get like the upper hand on everybody else. When you grow up weak and you start to master your mind, because my whole thing is whenever I'm weak at something, whenever I'm scared of something, I master it. I was a weak-minded person, so I mastered my mind. And in mastering my mind, I mastered the human mind.

And I realized why I no longer judge people, why I no longer put people on a pedestal, because we're all fucked up our own way. We all have demons. Some people hide them better than other people. So I know we all have them. But me hide them better than other people. So I know we all have them. But me knowing that, I know that most alpha males are very fragile, very fragile. They never want to see another person harder than them, especially in that kind of realm. Right, the ego attachment to those is very strong.

Ego will fuck you up every time. Ego is serious. So if I can hurt your ego, I got you. So by me having such a fragile ego growing up, all this was my advantage. I was doing a live autopsy on how fucked up I was. I was like, hey, this fucks me up. I better fucks other people up too. So I started using all these different tools and tactics to get in instructors' heads. And taking souls, that's where it happened, man. We were Wednesday, freezing fucking cold. Everybody's jackhammering. Everybody's just wanting to get through it now. Jackhammering is when you just can't stop shivering.

You can't stop shivering. You're sitting there just uncontrollably jackhammering. And the instructors take great pride in watching you suffer. They do. In a sick way, it's kind of funny. You were there once as a student. Now you're an instructor. But I knew, how would I be thinking if I was an instructor?

I would love seeing this sadistic shit go on. But what wouldn't I like to see? I would hate to see some guys just looking like this is just another fucking day on the fucking beach and go fuck yourself. I would hate to see that. Because they don't want to think when they did it, they were harder. They were harder. Everybody's harder. So I said, you know what, man? It's time.

I can't fight you. You guys can fuck me up all day long. That's your job. And I love your job. I love what you guys are doing. You guys are making us better. But now I want to take the tactical advantage and I'm going to start fucking with you. So I got my boat crew, Bill Brown. I had Chris Kyle on my boat crew, American Sniper. I had a couple of hardcore motherfuckers. And everybody right now is kind of like in their own world. Let's just get through this, man. I can't wait till Friday so we can graduate and

hope we can get going. I said, let's go ahead and have some fun. I said, we're going to start fucking with these guys. So the evolution here was we just got through with med check. We're stripped down to nothing, and they're checking us out, making sure we're good, checking for pneumonia, checking for fucked up knees. My knee's all jacked up, but they're giving me shots and shit. And I was like the boat crew leader of boat crew two. So I'm in the front of the boat, and I tell our guys this is what we're going to do. The boat was on our heads. That's all it was.

We're supposed to lift the boats up above our head. That's all you got to do. But when you're this weak, you're this fragile was We're supposed to lift the boat up above our head That's all you got to do But when you're this weak You're this fragile You're this tired The boat's heavy So there's a thing you can do When you do boat presses

You can get the boat and like Toss it up Toss it up and catch it And that shows like you're jacked up So everybody's holding the boat And they're shaking And the boat's starting to come down on their head And all the boat crews are all lined up

And they're fucked up And I'm looking at that And I turn around and my both start to come down their head and all the boat crews are all lined up and they're fucked up And I'm looking at that and I turn around my book. I say guys It's time to fucking take some souls. They're like what the fuck you talking about? I said we're gonna see all these fucking instructors out here all in their fucking jackets and drinking coffee and laughing and smiling shit I want their fucking faces to go straight up fucking numb. So we're gonna do this We're gonna start boat pressing this motherfucker. Just take my lead. Trust me. You'll get energy from it. We start throwing this boat up in the fucking air,

catching it, throwing it up in the air, and we start yelling, can't hurt fucking boat crew too. We're yelling our fucking ass off, and we're doing it. And they make a stop, like what the fuck, like a stop. I look at these instructors, and their faces literally look like someone like just like took their soul out i know where their minds were like they were thinking about themselves like what the fuck just happened man i know me on wednesday i couldn't have done that how are they doing it so the rest of time going through hell week it was like we just- You owned it. We owned it.

Right. Boat crew too. We won every single race. We were just dominating. And it was a strong boat crew. And that's where Taking Souls is. There's a few Taking Souls stories, but that's one of them. Yeah.

And part of that is learning how to be a leader. Like when you're dealing with these alpha males and these huge egos, there's this tendency to just try to outshine the next guy, right? You tell an example, there's another guy who kind of proceeds along that path. Right. And he realizes very quickly that he's not going to make it because he doesn't know how to build camaraderie with the other guys. Right, right. Talk about Mr. Dobbs. He's a good friend of mine still to this day.

And he went into that place, man, and I knew where he was going. It was in my third hell week, and I knew Sean real well, but I knew he was real arrogant. He had a serious chip on his shoulder like I do. I still do. I got that controlled every now and then, and it got me in a lot of trouble sometimes. But I knew he had it. I knew that chip on his shoulder like I do. I still do. I got to control it every now and then. It got me in a lot of trouble sometimes. But I knew he had it.

I knew that chip on your shoulder not being controlled, it will get you fucked up. And it cost him a lot going through buds. And I saw the look. I saw the look because I once had the look when I was going through pararescue school. When something got so hard and your mind can't process the hardness, you don't know the the the right tools to get

through something hard because you've never been challenged before i could tell he was a super human that nothing ever challenged him but i knew because i've already been through hell week a couple times i knew motherfuckers don't don't underestimate that shit it will it will find a fucking demon and it will bring out some insecurities in you. And it did. And I, it was like maybe 30 hours in the hell week or something like that. I'm looking over at him and I smile at him. We're, we're standing just like this in line and he's getting his med check.

A doctor's looking at him. It happened just to be beautiful timing. And I'm sitting there, I'm getting med checked and I'm, I'm looking at him and his eyes says he's a thousand yards still looking right through me. And he's getting med checked and I'm looking at him, and his eye says he's 1,000 yards still looking right through me. He's getting med checked, and I'm looking at him, and before all this happened, I told him, I said, don't underestimate this motherfucker, man. He goes, I can't ever see myself quitting shit,

Goggins. I go, watch out. I go, watch out. I go, this motherfucker will get in your head. I go, the end is a long way away. So we're sitting there eye to eye, and he didn't see me. I'm right in front of him. And I can tell he's thinking he has that quitting mind starting up. I look at him. I go, I told you, motherfucker. I told you, motherfucker. The next thing I knew, man, a car pulls up, and he rolled out.

Rings the bell. He rings the bell, and he quits. But he's a great human being, hard motherfucker. It doesn't make you, you know, when you quit something like that, man, it's a huge lesson learned that I can't go into anything thinking that there's nothing that's not going to get in my way. You got to be prepared for all those obstacles. Right.

Well, on this theme of the reader being the hero here, what is the takeaway on the stealing souls thing? Because that's one of the challenges. Well, there's tons of takeaways with that one, man. It's about finding energy and strength when you have none. Like a lot of times in life, like that situation right there, man, it's the worst time of your life. There's energy all around us, but we think that we have to have it's the worst time of your life. There's energy all

around us, but we think that we have to have, it has to come externally a lot of times. We have to have like a TV in front of us, watch somebody, listen to a podcast, listen to a great music. A lot of times in life, it's fucking quiet. And those are the times when you want to run and hide. You got to be able to find energy. You got to games make up tricks make up whatever you can to get to the next evolution of life So taking souls is just another way. It's not about hurting the person you're against It's about finding the tactical advantage in every situation you fucking physically can To get to the next you're trying to inch further to the goal line

And you don't want to inch further to the goal line. And you don't want to throw it down. And what is that goal line? The goal line is whatever it is for you. For me, I want to get through Hell Week. I want to get through Hell Week with my head up high, being strong. I don't know what the goal line is for everybody. My goal line has been very different for most people. But you're trying to find energy and strength to stay in the fight,

to continue on until you get that second wind. The second wind is coming, whatever the second wind may be for you. It's coming, but what happens is we get so stressed out that the end is so far away that we just can't find another foothold, another handhold, so we jump off the cliff and we just fall. There's another one. You got to find it, so we jump off the cliff and we just fall. There's another one. You got to find it. So taking soul is the one way to do it. Well, as you progress through this journey that you're on and you're winning these victories along the way, this idea kind of comes upon you, which is this drive to be uncommon amongst the uncommon, right? You mentioned a few moments earlier that you started distancing yourself even from the seals themselves. Like,

okay, I've done this. I've distinguished myself amongst these guys. Like now what's the next challenge? How can I push myself harder? Like who, you know, what are the other circumstances I can put myself in to be the hardest motherfucker on planet Earth, which was kind of the driving impulse underneath all of this, right? Right. So elaborate on that a little bit. So for me, that's why I wanted to become a Navy SEAL. I wanted people to push me outside of my comfort zone every day, you know, and I thought this

was going to be the absolute best platform to do that. These guys, the stories I heard after Bud's, it just gets harder. And I didn't see it that way. Because Bud's is just to become the CEO. That's right. I'm like, my God, I can't even imagine what the fuck's going to happen. But what happens to a lot of people, not everybody, can't speak for everybody, I don't know everybody.

Bud's breaks people down to the point where you don't want to be broken down again like that. To me, that was exactly the exact starting point for my journey in life. That was a starting point for me. For a lot of people, it's the finish line. And I didn't see it that way for me. So that's where I started becoming uncommon amongst uncommon people is where I started realizing that you put people on a pedestal that you shouldn't, that you got to get in there yourself and examine people, see what's really about yourself. So once I got in there and realized, hey, these are just normal people.

Yeah, they're a lot better than some. They're able to get through. I know a lot of people who can get through Navy SEAL training. But, you know, there's a lot of mystique behind all that stuff. And as you start to go through and you start to break it open a little bit, a lot of hard guys, but I want it more. I want it more. And this is your strength in certain respects. It's a superpower that you have, but it's also your Achilles heel. Big time. Big time. I talk about it in the book a lot, too.

One thing that hurt me a lot was I thought everybody wanted the same thing I wanted. And everybody wants the same thing you fucking want. Everybody wants to get up at 4 o'clock in the morning and beat themselves and find more about themselves and shit like that. And I thought the SEALs did. Most people don't. Most people don't. Yeah. And I thought the SEALs did.

I thought that's what, you know, because every book you read, that's what everybody does. So I was hook, line, and sinker. So that mentality that I had, it kind of put a bad taste in my mouth once I realized that not everybody was like this in the community. And I was like, you know what, man? So then I started having chips on my shoulder. I had my own little thing I was doing with a couple of guys, working out on my own, do my own little thing. And when you start doing that stuff and you start to drive yourself away from people, you know, and I was already different as it was. You know, even if I didn't do that, I already came in being very different. Like I tell people, I was a part of the Navy SEAL teams.

I wasn't part of the Brotherhood. Right. You're not going out and partying with them at night? No, that's not me. That's never been me though. If I was in a college, if I wasn't a big... I couldn't be part of a fraternity, man. I would never join a fraternity ever. I'd be like, fuck you all, man. I got my own shit going on over here, man. Go fuck yourself. That's me. I don't like fraternities. So just me, when you join the SEAL teams, you're joining a big fraternity So I was already

Assed out. So then when you're asked out not wanting to hang out. I wasn't a dick. I do my own shit. That's me So I I grew up wanting friends At a young age and once you get self-esteem and shit, you know who you are I was comfortable you're not liking me but not hanging out wanting friends at a young age. And once you get self-esteem and shit, you know who you are. I was comfortable. You're not liking me, but I'm not hanging out. And then you take it to another step further with this being hard mentality of if you guys aren't doing what I'm doing, you guys aren't shit.

So I did a lot of things that pushed people the wrong way, that rubbed people the wrong way. And in that, being in the fraternity, it's like a big soap opera. It's like the fucking guiding light. And, you know, people start not liking you for certain reasons. People don't even know who the fuck you are.

Rumor mills start happening. Then I have two heart surgeries. People think I don't want to fucking deploy overseas. Oh, goggles don't want to fight. He just wants to run. But I'm not going to say I had two heart surgeries. I couldn't want to fucking deploy overseas. Oh, goggles don't want to fight. He just wants to run. But I'm not going to say that. I had two heart surgeries. I couldn't even go fight.

So just a lot of things happened. And within that, it's life. Yeah. But ultimately, that hurt your military career. It didn't hurt it. Didn't? No. Me looking back on it, I was who I wanted to be.

I was who I wanted to be. So hurting it, I don't think hurting it is being an Air Force guy, being a Navy SEAL, being a Ranger. My goals were finding the baddest men on the planet, working with the baddest guys on the planet. And the heart surgery has hurt me a little bit. But what I realized is I've got a lot of growth from examining people. You know, my insecurities, their insecurities, my military career was absolutely stellar. You know, not many people have pulled off Honor Man everywhere I went and done the things I've done. I didn't deploy as much as I wanted to. Yeah, I went to Iraq, stuff like that.

But I wanted to deploy a lot more with the heart surgery to keep keeping out of training for four years. That hurt me a lot. But all in all, there's not many people who've done some of the things I've done. Right. So not satisfied with just being in the Navy SEALs, you decide you want to go to Army Ranger School. Yes, sir. And you go and do that. Yep. And you distinguish yourself there. So, you know, when the dust settles, you've done Air Force, what is it called? The program? TACP. It's called TACP, Air Control Party. Navy SEALs, BUDS, and then Army Ranger School. Army Ranger School. And I went to Delta Selection twice also.

Right, exactly. So how did that play out ultimately? So at Delta Selection, I went the first time. So I went both times as a Navy SEAL, which is very frowned upon because we have our own little group there, a dev group. So how that even came to be was after my second platoon where me and my guys didn't get along, we had a great deployment, but we didn't get along. Bottom line, once again, it's how life is. When you come back in a fraternity like that, rumor mill flat goes around, and maybe Goggins has a bad attitude,

don't work with him, whatever, whatever. So I didn't get my orders to go to DevGrew. I actually screened for DevGrew, didn't get picked up, or I got picked up to go to the screening process. I passed the screening process, was going to Green Team, a lot of these fucking things nobody knows about.

But anyway, I didn't get my orders to go to Dev Group. So I said, you know what? It's a good time for me to go try out for Delta Force. So I went there, got messed up. I fell down a mountain. My lady got trapped in a mountain or in some rocks, broke my ankle, messed up my ankle real bad. Then I had the heart surgeries. Then I went back to Delta,

and I was getting ready to get to the very last day. And what happened there was I was getting real happy. I'm going to be a Delta guy. This is the shit. I can't believe it. I'm back in the game. And once you let your mind get unfocused, you get lost out in the woods. And out there going through Delta Selection, it's a lot of land navigation.

And if you're not paying attention to that map and compass, and it was my last day before the 40-miler, and the 40-miler was like the big last thing you do. And I was going to fuck that 40-miler up. Right. That's your game. That's my game, man. There's one thing you're. And I was going to fuck that 40 miler up. Right. That's your game. That's my game, man. And the very- There's one thing you're going to be able to execute on. I'm going to fuck that up, man. You put weight on my back and go, man. I'm going to hurt you. And I got, literally, I was about two hours ahead of time. And I was just going through thinking, man, I'm fucking done. I made this shit, man. I'm going to go back into doing my shit.

thinking, man, I'm fucking done. I made this shit, man. I'm going to go back into doing my shit. I'm going back out to fight, man, with an elite group, a tier one asset. I was so stoked. My mind got drifting away and I got lost. And I found myself lost. I got fucking back on track and I went to where I thought my last point was. I saw another student. I said, hey, man, we only got five points. He goes, hey, man, we only got five points. He goes, no, motherfucker, we got six. And I was like 45 minutes from drop dead, and I made it by one minute. And you can make it by one minute

after making it by two hours every day. I was getting there two hours early every day. I don't know what the standard is at Delta. They don't tell you shit. And there's two vehicles you get into, man. One vehicle goes to another campground, meaning you're still here. And the other vehicle goes to some speed bumps back to your racks, and you get in a fucking airplane.

I went in that vehicle. Yeah, that was it. How many soldiers are there, though, that have gone through all of those programs? I can say, honestly, I'm the only one. You're the only one. For 100% fact. I know for a fact, for a fact, and I haven't Googled it and looked at it.

I know there's nobody in the world who's willing to say, let me screen for Delta Force twice. Let me go to Army Ranger School as a Navy SEAL. Let me go to Navy SEAL. Let me go be in three Hell Weeks. Let me go to Air Force. So my military career was phenomenal. There's a classic quote in the book. I think it's, as I recall, I think it's when you decided you wanted to go to Army Ranger School,

and one of your guys says, he goes, man, Goggins, you're the kind of guy who would like to be a POW just to see if you could fucking do it. He was my OIC, and I actually still talk to him today, of my first platoon. I really respect the guy an awful lot. I wish I could pop his name, but I don't have his permission right now. He was a great leader because he understood me. As a good leader, you have to understand everybody that works with you. He understood the uniqueness that is me. And I'm a very different person. You got to be a real fucking man to understand David Goggins.

And I give him a lot of credit for this. Let me be me. And I screamed, and he went to DevGrew. But he said that before Ranger School because I put a chit in. A chit is a special request chit. I put seven special request chits in to go to Ranger School as a new guy in the SEAL teams. It's like, why the fuck are you trying to go to Ranger School, man, as a SEAL?

And back then, they were sending some Navy SEALs there for punishment. They sent a few there, and I was going because I was begging to go. I'm like, there's another challenge out there that sucks, that people don't want to go to, that I can grow from, that I can see some more uncommon motherfuckers out there that want to get hard and get after it. And I always found out one thing. When you're in training, that's where you find how people really are. I found the best out of people in training. That's why I love Buzz. That's why I love Ranger School.

But once you get out of training, very few people keep that same mentality. It's like, hey, thank God I'm done with it. That's why I always love going back to scratch. Yeah, and the cool thing about Ranger School is you show up, and they strip you of everything. So you don't know who anybody is or what their rank is or any of that kind of shit. No, there's no rank. There's no shit. And they just presume that you must have gotten in trouble, right?

Right. That's the only reason you'd be there. Right. So tell that story about- So before I showed up to ranger school, man, there were a couple of couple of navy seals got sent there for punishment reasons and a couple of them quit you know like not because it was too hard i imagine probably because you know fuck you i'm not gonna be here for punishment i'm not gonna get my ass kicked again with you navy seal training so it just came with the attitude of being there so a couple of

them i'm out so that gave some of the seals a bad reputation at ranger school and then i show up i show up and i'm like yeah i want to be here and they thought i was just another guy that got in trouble not knowing that i begged to come here and i begged to get beat on for 69 days and starve and lose 56 pounds like i lost so it's like day three and they have you know an army guy we're all stripped to rank. I'm just David, you know, I'm just Goggins and whoever, it's just your name. I mean, you could be a fucking major. You could be a general and you're just Thomas.

That's all the fuck you are, man. They don't care. So I'm hiding out, but I got my little Navy name tag on so they can tell I'm a Navy guy, my little Navy hat, you know, so they know I'm a Navy guy. I stand out. And once again, there's not many black guys in Ranger school.

So I'm in the back hiding out and they tell the you know, they tell the guy come up here You're the first sergeant in the first sergeant. You should know the range of Creed so the guy goes up there and he goes, uh He fucks it up and they go hey They look right at me. I know for a fact. Oh Seamen back there with a hill. they call me Doesn't know this shit I was like Motherfucker

I've been studying This Ranger Creed For a year This is what I'm saying In my head I get up there man Recognizing I volunteer As a Ranger

Fully in the hands Of my chosen profession I wasn't there To help with Steve's Honor I was supposed to Be called a Ranger He goes you're done

I went on And now as a fact The Ranger more or less He's like what the fuck So I went ahead And said the whole Fucking Ranger Creed Next thing I knew

He goes hey You're the new first sergeant. I was like, fuck. Now, not only am I going through one of the best leadership schools, you have to be dialed in all day long. When I'm not out in the field getting graded, I'm now in garrison having to be in charge of all these fucking guys in Bravo platoon.

So Bravo Company. So I was like, guys, I always had to be on the whole time. Roger that. Roger that. So I was like, fuck it, man. I guess I'm in charge now the whole time. But I never got fired. Most guys going through that, you get fired.

And that's what led me to getting the Honor Man Award. Right. Right. One of the things you don't talk a lot about is your deployments. You talk about that experience in Malaysia a little bit, only briefly in the book. So I'm just wondering what the rationale behind that, like, are you not allowed to? Did you just think that it wasn't relevant to the story you were trying to tell? Well, the thing about it is,

is I deployed, I fought in combat, stuff like that. First of all, it's hard to relate to that. Second of all, I had to get all kind of fucking approvals from people to get that in the book and talk about it. And I didn't want to go through that process of, hey, can I put, you know, what I did in Iraq in the book and stuff like that in the book. And I want my book to relate to people. You know, there's enough Navy SEAL books out there talking about, you know, running gun and shooting them up, stuff like that. That's never been, I don't want to be known as a Navy SEAL. You know, I talk a lot of, you know,

people want to ask me about it. You know, Navy SEAL, that was a snippet of my life. You know, that was a snippet of my life. That was a snippet of my life. And I want to be known as somebody much more than that, who did a lot more than that. So my book is about helping people. And I can't help people through what I did in combat. I can help people by what I went through in life, life itself. And I went out to, I mean, it was intentional to make this book about how can these stories resonate and help people. And it wasn't like, hey, let me kiss my own ass. So that's why I had to go there and do that. So it was, that's why.

Yeah. Well, there's the cover image of the book is you in military uniform. And there are a lot of those other kind of books out there. You know, Chris Kyle. And I know you're tight with the Luttrell brothers. Those have been huge books and they become movies and

very culturally relevant. And another thing about that, I'm not a war hero. Yeah. I'm not a war hero, man. Like, you know, there's a lot of heroes out there and I don't have a great story to tell you about war. What is the climate though when you're in the SEALs and then somebody writes a book? My sense was always that that was kind of frowned upon. It is frowned upon. A lot of things are frowned upon in the SEAL teams. A lot of things are. That's one of them. I don't care what you do. It's your life. And I'm

not about judging people for that. But a lot of SEALs don't like anybody going out doing anything like that. And I don't know if it's a lot of jealousy or whatever. I don don't care but it is it is found upon for some people to do that um but i guarantee you some of those guys if they did some cool shit you know a lot of us don't do cool shit yeah a lot of us see combat not a lot of cool shit so the book really isn't about it's not it's not some vainglorious thing where you're in battle and you're telling crazy war stories no it's not that at all it it i don't have many war stories to tell. The reader is the hero. And another one of the themes that I want to kind of explore with you is this idea of

being the only, right? Which is like a recurring thing in your story. Right. So being the only, and I actually talked about with Adam, I came up with the only. There's a lot of onlys out there. I was the only black in a lot of situations. And the only in about a color. There's a lot of, you know, there's gays, there's lesbians, there's people who are white people who just feel like they're not wanted in society. That's the only. The only is feeling like you're not accepted in any society that you're in.

It doesn't matter what color, creed, race, gender. It doesn't matter. It's just that you are in this situation where you feel like you're being judged. You might be being judged. You feel awkward. It's an awkward feeling when you walk in a room and you're like, oh, my God. Like, I'm the only. And that comes with a lot of people.

And that's where the only really came from because I didn't want to make like a black situation. I want it to be, I want this, this is about people. You are your own hero. You are the hero of this book. So I want it to be, what's a word that can make people feel like this resonates with me? That's only, you know, it's not about,

it was about black or about white or about being Jewish or Christian or whatever. So that's where it comes from, man. It's about ownership of a lot of people feel like no one understands what the fuck I'm going through right now. And that's the only. Right. And that seems to be something that you, you use, you leverage to, to get stronger. Oh yes. The only is a very powerful thing for me. And there's a lot of times in my life that I chose the only on purpose, on purpose, just to see how I would come out the other end of it. And in the midst of all of that, how do I say this? For somebody that's listening to this or they're reading your book and they do feel apart from, they feel alone, perhaps they have that victim mentality, right?

They're just, the world's against me. I can't catch a break every time I try to do this. This happens. It's some narrative that they're spinning about their life. Right. Like, what's the It's some narrative that they're spinning about their life. What's the first step out of that? Well, like I've said a million times before, the most important conversation is the one you have with yourself. You wake up with it, you walk around with it,

you go to bed with it. Eventually, you act on it. Sometimes you act on it good, sometimes bad. You got to change the internal dialogue. That person in your head that's talking that shit to you, until you change the internal dialogue in your head, until you callous over the victim's mentality that the world is out to get you because of you are the only, you got to change that shit, man. Yeah, but you don't understand my life, David. Yeah, I do. That's the thing about it, and that's why I can talk about it.

But yeah, I get what you're saying. A lot of folks don't. I get that mentality. I once had that mentality that no one understands what the fuck I'm going through. And if you keep that mentality, you're going to stay in the same exact spot that you're in, that no one understands me. There's a whole there's millions of people. me. There's a whole, there's millions of people. Why do you think a book that I self-published is doing so well with a story that's so fucked up? People are like, I never get what, I went to a publishing house, like, who's going to resonate with this story? No one's going to buy this book. I'm like, are you not in the world? Are you not in society? You're never alone. Everybody's going through shit. So when people get this mentality of like, you don't understand me, you can throw a fucking rock to someone that can understand you if they're willing to break themselves down and stop hiding. A lot of people understand you, but you got to stop hiding. And that's why I tell people, a lot of people are going through shit.

They just hide better than you did. That's all they did. They were hiding better. Yeah, it's easy. You know, it's easy. Even after you've accomplished something to not rest on your laurels or take a breath. Like you're somebody who's constantly, constantly moving forward. I am.

But I think one thing that gets lost in your story is that you are pretty good about celebrating the victories along the way And celebrating yourself. I talk about with my fiance every single day I talked about with her two hours today I said we are fucking grinding so hard that we are losing the vantage point of what we have accomplished today We got podcast podcast interview do this, do that. I'm like, stop. Stop. It's just me and you and this mom and pop thing that we're doing.

Look at where the fuck this book is at right now. It's crazy. Look how many people we're touching. Shut up and just fucking think for a second. Let's stop. Because all we did was talk about this and this. No. Enjoy this for a second. Let's stop. Because all we did was talk about this and this. No. Enjoy this for a second.

We have to take time and realize what the fuck we've accomplished here. That's an evolution for you, man. Huge. Huge. But I realize. That's a very different David Goggins than even from a couple years ago. Huge. Because you have to.

What is it all about? I'm going to keep on grinding. That's not what I'm saying. What I am saying, though, is you have to respect what you've done. Take a second. Not live in it. Not sit around and say, I'm good. Sit back and say, let me look at the vantage point now that I'm at.

That's why you reset the vantage point. Get the tactical advantage. If you get the tactical advantage too quick and start fighting, you got to take a second to take observation of where I'm at. What have I done? Am I in the right spot?

I'm obviously in the right spot right now. Now we can go back to fighting. So that's what we're doing right now. And how did you arrive at that epiphany? Because I would imagine there's a different version of you that wouldn't allow yourself to be that indulgent. It's called you find peace.

I never found peace until I got real sick. And you find peace by clarity. And there's no clarity when there's noise. There's always a schedule in front of you to keep grinding at it. So my schedule is always there. I'm still alive. And while schedule is always there. I'm still alive. And while I'm still alive, I'm going to grind until I'm dead. But in that grinding schedule, you have to have a point in there where it's okay, at 12 o'clock, reset the tactical advantage

and look and see where you're at. At this new vantage point, stop for a second and survey the field. Because what I was doing was I had this big, long schedule. And in this schedule, there was no take a second, see what the fuck you've accomplished. Because if I did all that shit in the military, after I got honor man at Ranger School, and I was the top leader amongst 300 people,

when I got back to that second platoon, if I had taken advantage point and said, okay, my God, man, you've really grown as a leader, I would have attacked the situation that second platoon was differently when I was like, oh, you guys are fucking, you guys won't work out this fucking hard? You ain't hard like this? I would have learned, I would have taken a step back and said, okay, hang on a second, man. You learned a lot. That's the tactical advantage. You got to take that advantage point and take a second to breathe and say you learned a lot. But when you learn a lot, if you just go back into the fight, you never apply what you learned.

You just get that certificate of graduation and go. Get it, remember what you learned, and use it. And that's about taking that one second out, get on top of that mountaintop, looking down and say, okay, how would I have handled this years ago? Wow, I would have really fucked that up. This time, let's not fuck it up again. Right.

So that occurred not during the heart surgeries, but afterwards when your body was broken and you got into the stretching. Broken. Yeah. It was a big, it's like when you go and somebody gives you a knot and they tie a lot versus tying a knot, they tie a lot. They say, hey, can you undo this? That was the inside of my body. But it forced you to stop.

It made me stop, yeah. Yeah. I couldn't no longer go. Because otherwise you wouldn't have stopped. I would never realize what I realize now. No. Yeah. I've been gone, man.

So it's this blessing, right? Like, hey, man, we got to bench you because you need to reflect. The body will do that. The body will do that. The body will say, hey, man, you've done a good job. Now we're fucking done. And my body said, you're done. Right.

So you have the heart surgeries. You make this return to ultras. I mean, dude, we've been talking for like an hour and a half. We haven't even talked about any of the ultra stuff. But, you know, we talked about that last time, man. You go out, you're crushing it in all these races. Then you have the heart situation. You have two heart surgeries. Then you're back at it again. And then you hit this wall. Like you described this classic overtraining situation where you got back at it, and you were training super-duper hard,

and then you showed up, and you were just flat, right? Yeah. I started gaining weight overnight. My thyroid, my endocrine system started shutting down. Adrenals, yeah. Fucking just shutting down left and right. I'm surprised it took that long for you to have a severe overtraining episode. Yeah, it was severe.

It was probably overtraining mixed with a lot of other shit. The body was whacked. It was whacked, man. It just said, you're done. Go ahead. Hang up your shoes. Lay in the bed. It's time to die.

How long did that go on for? It went on about five years. Five years. Yeah. Wait, long did that go on for? It went on about five years. Five years. Yeah. So wait, what period of time was this? So you're looking at, it was Badwater. So before Badwater 2013 is when it started, I actually walked 100 miles of that race to finish it.

That was when I was crewing Dean that year. Yep. And you were right on our heels like most of the day. And if I was, I walked that whole thing. If I was on Dean's heels, he was walking a lot himself. Yeah, he was a lot of walking. It was not a good year. Yep. And you were right on our heels like most of the day. And if I was, I walked that whole thing. If I was on Dean's heels, he was walking a lot himself. Yeah, he was a lot of walking. So. It was not a good year for him either.

I walked that almost whole race. I was cramping up so bad. It looked like an alien was in my quads. They were just doing this weird thing. I was hydrating. So I was like, what the hell is going on? My body started shutting down then. And then I had like a period of time where I was like, my God, I'm feeling my best.

And I crushed this race called Frozen Otter. And I was like, my God, man, I'm back. No, I wasn't. It was just my body saying, we got one more in us, man, before we give it up. So 2013 is when it really started hitting hard, man. And it went on from there. Of all the things that you had to process, that was probably one of the hardest, being told you have to stop. It was one of my hardest,

but I have to be honest with you. It was the most eye-opening, refreshing time of my entire life. It was like it really made me reset. Like what it said to me was, all right, man, we still got to find 100%. You can't run. You can't work out.

So that's why I went to school and I became a medic. Stuff like that. I started doing all... I literally reset. So I'm always in constant pursuit of my 100%. Whatever that is, if I can't run anymore, I want to see what else I can do. So I was real proud of how I handled that. When my whole life got stripped from me, and I was at like 20 years in the military, and my life was getting stripped, man. And I couldn't run. I couldn't work. I couldn't do shit anymore.

And I didn't lose my shit. All that training I'd gone through, mental training I'd gone through, I was able to utilize it to find a lot of peace in myself, a lot of joy, and a lot of self-fulfillment. And it was actually not that bad of a time. Yeah. Well, my favorite chapter in the entire book is the final chapter. Oh, it's a sick chapter. Well, I mean, I was just so... Because one of the things I've always sort of thought about you or

been concerned about with you is like, is this guy going to just go to his grave grinding and just angry and resentful and venging against the world? Or is he going to be able to find peace? Is he going to be able to be content? Is he going to be able to find a way to find the joy and the gratitude for these experiences? Or are you just going to be fighting all the way to the end, man? And you found that. Right. I was so happy to read that.

Yeah, I found it. But what's great about it is I found it, but I can still tap into it. Yeah. Was there a moment of thinking, if I allow myself to experience joy and gratitude, that I'm not going to be able to be as hard, that I'm going to lose that edge that distinguishes me? No, that's not it at all. What it was was I never felt that my entire life. You're almost taught that shit.

When you're born in a happy home and you're born around happy shit, it kind of comes out. I don't laugh. My dad beat the laughter out of me. When you can't read and write and you're trying to hide out in classes and please don't call on me and shit and you're fucking all scared and shit everywhere you go. You're nervous and you're panicked and you're stuttering and your whole life is that shit. There's not joy in that shit. That becomes who you are no matter how much you change. You're scarred.

So people are like, my God, man, you never smile, you never do this. It's my life. It's my life. So you got to teach yourself how to read and write and also fucking smile and say it's okay. A lot of things aren't like, man, why don't you do this? I don't judge people. That's why I don't judge people. Man, you don't smile, look so hard like this. Read my book and don't forget where I came from. It's who you are. You have to undo that shit. And no one came down and trained me on how to be happy, how to find peace, how to do this and that.

That's why I'm so glad I found it through suffering. The greater the suffer, the greater the peace I found. But you have to reflect on where you came from, from the dungeon of hell that I came from, how to reflect on that shit to find final peace and be able to say, wow, motherfucker. If you die in this bed at 40 years old, I'm the happiest motherfucker in the world because I did it. I pissed people off along the way. Some people don't like me. Merry Christmas, whatever. But you can finally look in the fucking mirror and you can cuss on damn rich roll of shit and don't care what they say about you and be happy with it. The nonjudgmental part is a lesson that you had to learn the hard way too, right?

Big time. Yeah. Big time. I used to hate people not liking me. One of the hardest things in the world for me at a young age was, my God, I just want to fit in. I want to fit in. I want you to like me. So that's a horrible fucking place to be in life because you lose yourself when you want to fit in with people so badly normal fucking people no better than you you do it ever you can to fit in that's a bad place to be you lose yourself and trying to create a character that other people will accept and the that's where I found a lot of joy man this is God this is me I speak in the third person I'm fucked up I got some shit going. I'm fucked up. I got some shit going on.

I'm still working on myself. Take it or leave it. You don't like me? Take a number and get in line, man. And does that involve like a spiritual perspective? Like what does that look like for you? I am a, even though people may not believe it, because I cuss, which is hilarious,

I believe in God big time. I've had this voice in my head since I was a young kid. So what trained me was that voice. And I'm not going to go God on you right now. I don't care if people believe in God or not. That's not my place. I'm not here to judge you. You have your own life and your own things to deal with. This voice in my head guided me to the spot where I'm at today. And if you don't believe that you're here for a reason, your life will seriously hurt. And I started looking at my life and all the shit I went through as God put me, some God, wherever you believe in, put me here to go through this.

And now I see all the hundreds of thousands of lives I'm changing by the hell I went through. There's a lot of power in that. So my purpose, as I started going through this journey, instead of looking at like, woe is me, God, man, why the fuck, man, why? I started looking at it as it's the perfect training ground. You knew exactly what you were doing. You knew exactly what the fuck you were doing, obviously. You put me in every situation possible to tell a story that needs to be told. Yeah. Looking back, it's like every domino is lined up perfectly to create the person that I'm sitting across from right now. And also, you took advantage, you leveraged all of those

opportunities to be that best version of yourself. I did. As afraid of that, I mean, it was a very scary road. A guy who was afraid of a lot of things to then find power in fear, to find power in overcoming fear, and to get to where I'm at today where there's very few things I'm really afraid of because I know how to control it. I know how to manage it. I know how to work it to my advantage now. It's something else, man. So I really challenge people to really do a live autopsy on your brain. And the reason why I talk about my childhood so much in this, because I don't want you to put a title on me,

because once you title me as a freak, you now put yourself in a position where you can be very comfortable in saying, it's just not possible for me. Yeah. That's so important because you have done so many crazy things. It's very easy to just say, well, he's a crazy outlier. That's it. That's it. He's that guy. He's that special guy. Nope. And that's the thing that makes me so pissed off in this world, man. The only thing that gets me mad nowadays is that so many people die with untapped potential because they think that someone else is fucking better than them.

And they were born, you know, not with the greatest tools. You don't need shit. You need the ability to fucking grind your ass into a fine fucking powder. And when you're in that fine powder, find a way to build that motherfucker back up repeatedly. And it's possible. Yeah. For you, what I love is that you go out on these crazy training excursions

and it's just a pair of running shoes and shorts. Alone. That's it, man. You don't have any crazy gear. Nope. Any sponsored bullshit or anything like that. Nope. It's just at its most purest form.

I found a lot in that, man, always. It has to be pure, man. I don't want people, like, the reason I don't post, hey, post what you're doing today. No. No, man, this is my time. I want you to fucking know what I'm doing today. This is my time.

This is my growth factor, man. But I think it creates a lot of demand because when you do drop that bomb once a week or whatever it is, that video, it's like, holy shit, I'll look at it and I'll be like, damn, man, that thing's got like 200,000 views. You posted it like an hour ago. Hey, man, I let somebody know what's going on every now and then. It's all about giving back and training, but I'm still learning. I'm still learning. I'm not Yoda yet. What do you still need to learn? And what are you still afraid of? Honestly, my biggest fear to this day is, and I say it a lot, and I say it a lot, and it's going to heaven and being judged by God. And, you know, God has, I believe that God has this,

knows everything about you from the time you're born, when you're going to be born, when you're going to die, when you're going to graduate, buzz, whatever's going to happen to you, he knows all this shit. Some people never do what God knows you're capable of doing because, you know, we have choices. My biggest fear in life was to get to heaven and God look at me as I'm being judged. And I was some fat 300 pound guy like I used to be

that still sprayed for cockroaches. That's okay. It's what you want to do. I didn't want to do that. And I made a thousand dollars a month and I got to heaven and God laid out this chart in front of me. And he said, hey man, look at this chart and had my name on top of all this amazing shit And i'm like that's not that's not me man. He goes that's who you were supposed to be My biggest fear in life is that one day if I ever get judged by something someone some some energy force That go up there and i failed the mission whatever

whatever force up there thought i was supposed to be some badass and i went up there underachieved you know i want that force up there that knows everything to be writing as i'm living saying i had no fucking idea he even had this in him so i I want to just be the best I fucking can. And a lot of people say that. I truly mean that. And what is it that you have to learn? I still have to learn me. You know, I still feel there's times where, as a human being, I'm a human,

and you still fall back in these ruts of life where you think that you had a permanent fix because i've done all that nothing's a permanent fix man that's why i grind every day because nothing is permanent are you training for anything right now i'm signing up for the hurt 100 oh you actually got in it and my schedule is so fucking packed, but I'm hoping I have literally a one-day— literally, I can go out there, run the race, and fly back. Uh-huh. So I'm hoping— When is that? When is the race?

It is, I think, the 17th or 18th or 19th. It's that weekend right in there. That's a rare return to a race. I mean, other than Badwater— I've done that race three times already. Yeah. Oh, you've done Hurt three times? Three times.

Oh, you have. Okay. Yeah, I've done three times. And I haven't done a 100-mile race since that Badwater 2013. I've done several ultras, but that 100-mile distance, my body just wasn't just not there. It's there now, but now my schedule is so busy. But it's almost time, man. Right. But I feel like Badwater's your shit. It's there now, but now my schedule is so busy. But it's almost time, man. Right.

But I feel like Badwater's your shit. It is. That's the one that stands out amongst everything as the thing you're always trying to master. And what's funny about that, I'm just now getting to the point now where I'm going to be real dangerous next time I go out there. Well, listen, man. You're 43 now, right? 43. You're prime.

I am. This is the prime of my life. This is the prime of my life. This is my prime ultra in life. 43 was my best year. Was it? Yeah. I mean, you're ready to uncoil, man, I think. I believe so.

I don't want to divulge. The biggest challenge for you now is that your life is so big. And that's the thing, man. I used to be this underground. You can't be a monk. No. And the monk is what gave me my strength. I was an underground, much quieter, so much quieter in my life.

I silenced all the noise out. You're that guy in the corner with the hoodie on. That's me, man. Yeah. That's me. That's me. Dangerous. Dangerous motherfucker.

Try to, man. So we can expect another Badwater appearance. Oh, for sure. Yeah. For sure. This. For sure. This will not end without that motherfucker right there. Yeah. Well, I want to pivot a little bit and talk about the takeaways here for the reader.

I mean, we talked about the accountability mirror a little bit. We talked about visualization and taking souls. mirror a little bit. We talked about visualization and taking souls, but let's talk a little bit about how journaling has been instrumental in this journey that you've been on. Yeah. So basically I've been journaling now for several years and I should have brought my journal with me, man. I mean, I have several of them. I have these little green military notebooks that I've kept. I actually put a couple in the book there, a couple of write-outs. But I write down my day.

And what I do is I go back and study that day. Like sometimes I might get sick. I might be overtrained. I might gain a couple pounds here. I might feel whatever. It's like my accountability journal of what I'm doing with my life, physical, mental. I had an eating journal, all this shit.

And it helps me go back to, once again, study. I'm a lab rat. And I study myself. And when I'm feeling fucked up, I go, okay, what did I do last week? And usually I can find out where I messed up last week, how much I'm traveling, how much I'm sleeping, how much I'm doing all this stuff. And through journaling, man, you can really figure out so much about where you're messing up in life and what you need to fix about yourself. Taking constant inventory.

Constant. Being honest about that. And that's the thing about it. You cannot put bullshit in there. Yeah. It's got to be a real journal about, hey, today I messed up here. Today I should have been a better person here. And not just saying it, but actually trying to fix it tomorrow.

Do you extend that accountability to including, like bringing in like a close circle of friends and mentors so they know what's going on? Or are you just accountable to yourself? Like if somebody's looking at this and saying, well, I could do that, but how do you feel about letting others in on your goals and having like external pressure to hold you accountable? No, there's no external pressure. Well, you don't need it. No. You know what I mean? But I think other people.

Oh, yeah. It's important to have circles. It's important to have, like I talk about, man, like that big rabbit hole of bad people that you want to get away from. If you're drunk and you want to stop drinking, you got to get away from those people. You want to build this nucleus around you of people who are saying, it's not okay to sleep in today. We got to get after it. Hey, let me see your journal. You're supposed to be running five miles a day. You only ran three. You got to have those people.

Some people need those people. It's important. But you want to get to the point in your life, it's real important, that you hold yourself accountable and those people start to fade away because you now got it. You want to be that person because they're not always going to be there to hold your hand. Talk to me about the cookie jar.

One of the most powerful weapons I have, man, is the cookie jar. In times of need, even the hardest person forgets how badass they are. So I've been through a lot of shit in my life. When you're going through a hard time right now, you forget all the hard shit you endured endured So the cookie jar is a reminder That oh I can get through this hard time right now, but you got to take a second or two To reach into the mental cookie jar. Let's say it's a fortune cookie But in my mind my mom used to buy these cookies, you know in the cookie jar and there's an oreo chips or whatever That's where I got the cookie jar from

But you got to open up and say okay, man, I was in three hell weeks. And I got through two of them. You know, I was in ranger school. I endured being called nigger. I saw these beatings. My mom's soon-to-be husband got murdered. I saw a little kid's head get ran over. All these things I endured alone.

I have to remind myself of the strength and the power that I have, that it's in me. It's just a reminder of how badass you are in hard times because we just forget that that bad time consumes our mind and we forget who we are. Torching complacency. You have to do that every day, man. A lot of us are very you you become complacent you become very civilized in life you know the worst thing that can happen to a person you become civilized when you get to that point where you believe that you've arrived when you my god man i'm up there near Michelle Obama on my book. I've done it, man.

I'm good. You can coast. I'm good, man. You don't have to do hurt. I ain't got to do hurt. You played your man card, dude. The fuck I'm doing? I don't have to be a wildland firefighter, man. I retired from the military.

I ain't got to go out there and dig fire line for three miles. I'm 43, man. I've done it. You should just be flying first class everywhere and doing speeches and getting paid crazy cash. And laying in a hotel, kicking it, man. And that's exactly when it's over. That mindset right there to me is death. I'm not saying you can go as hard as you did when you were 20 or now at 43, but there's a new bar that you must always set in your life. And once you become complacent and you become civilized, you've arrived,

you're no good for anybody. And how do you keep that bar high when most challenges now, I would imagine, seem trivial compared to what you've endured? They are. I go back to the sewer, and the sewer is that $7 a month place

I once lived in as a young kid. So even though... Mentally. Mentally. Mentally. And I always talk about it. I talk about I'm always paying rent in that $7 a month place where I grew up. In that nasty little place I grew up in, I remember it. I remember like it was yesterday and I'm glad I do. I never want to forget the dungeon of where I come from. Even though it's real spooky and it's scary and there's no lights on in there

and there's cobwebs and some creepy motherfuckers in there, some demons, all those motherfuckers in there made me Gagans, made me who I am today. That's where the strength came from. You got to go back to the beginning, to the fundamentals of life,

to the very fundamentals of where it all, like playing basketball. You got to go back to the fundamentals. You can't always just stay up here. You got to go back to scratch. And that's how you get better. So the challenge becomes staying in tune with that. That's right.

You know what I mean? Because life's getting better and easier for you and bigger, and there's more demands on your time, and people are throwing really cool, fun shit at you. I'm always going can ask my fiance, my conversation on a weekly basis is I cannot get away from who the fuck I am. Who I am is who I'm proud of.

I'm very proud of the hardworking, calloused hands, calloused mind, human being that I literally made this person with a lot of help from above, a lot of guidance from saying, you're going to go left and you should go right. That horrible voice that wouldn't let me get away from myself and hide forever. I listened to it. I listened to it. And the only way you can set the example is you have to always be willing to work. I don't follow people who talk about what they used to do in life. I don't give a fuck what you used to do. I don't

care that you used to be the best. I don't care. What are you doing today? You may not be that person now, but what are you still doing to try to excel in life? And a lot of people now are talking. I hear so much talk. I don't hear a lot of work. I hear a lot of people telling you what you should be doing, how you should be doing it, how you should be fucking living. And I look at them and you're fat, you're out of shape, you look like shit, but you're telling a motherfucker how to live. No, man, I won't listen to you. There's so many people speaking this shit. And that's what bothered me a lot in the military. There's a lot of people talking shit. I don't see the real suffering

behind it, behind what you're saying. That's why I said, man, you talk with so much passion because it's a real fucking place. It sucks to get up in the morning time. It was raining like cats and dogs. I want to get my shoes on and go run, but guess what? I got my shit on and ran.

Got that motherfucker on and ran. The vision that's coming into my mind is Jake LaMotta at the end of Raging Bull when he's all fat and he's staring at himself in his own lack of accountability mirror, right? Right. Like drunk and talking about the good old days. Right. There are no good old days, man. There are no good old days. You got to go back and use it for strength, man, but it's where you're at now. I think one of the most powerful takeaways, challenges that you pose in the book is the schedule it in thing, man,

because the biggest thing that I hear and I know you must hear constantly every single day is like, I don't have time, man. You don't know my life. I got this. I got that. I got this. It's just not going to happen for me. Right.

What you don't have is you haven't prioritized your life correctly. We all have time. We all have time. What you've done wrong is that you didn't prioritize yourself. You didn't prioritize that, look, motherfucker, I got to get up and win this war today against myself. I need to look better. I need to feel better.

I need to eat better. I need to prioritize time. Or I got to run 100 miles on broken feet. Or you got to do that. Whatever it is. That's it. That's it, man. There's a lot of growth in that shit.

Scheduling it in. scheduling it in. So I like this idea of taking this inventory tool and applying it to how you're spending your time throughout the day. I talk about this a lot. You went into detail in this challenge about, look, man, if you actually write down how you're spending your time throughout the day over a seven-day period, you're going to... I mean, it's crazy because I thought I was being pretty efficient with my time and I've done this and it's just amazing how much time is wasted that you're not even consciously aware. Unreal how much time you waste during the day. And most of it is on these fucking computers, phones, Instagram and back and forth, whatever the fuck you call it nowadays,

tweeting and texting and shit. We waste so much time on our little gadgets. It's unreal. And we talk about we have no time. If you really take, you have to take your day and write down this one day. Everything you do, write that down. And you're like, my God, I am wasting so much time on frivolous bullshit. It's not even funny.

I mean, it will, if it doesn't infuriate you, it should. Because there's so much time. I can't get it in. Look at your schedule. You just wasted seven hours today on bullshit. I mean, you don't have an hour a day to try to get something in for yourself. I guarantee everybody can find an hour. Then it becomes about willingness.

Yeah. Because most people just, they're not willing to get up that early or to make those sacrifices required. So it's a function of how badly do you want to change your life and what are you willing to endure to craft that life that you aspire to have, or do you just want to talk about it? Yeah. I mean, it's fucking miserable. It is miserable. I mean, to get up every day or five days a week or whatever, when it's snowing, not shiny, not comfortable, and to go in the gym and work out when you don't want to go to the gym, it is not fun. Well, and we're in a culture that is driving everybody towards this idea that happiness is purchased through luxury, comfort, and ease. 100%.

The truth could not be more different from that reality, that if you want to find peace with yourself, self-understanding, self-knowledge, self-esteem, all of these things are going to be found only through sacrifice, getting uncomfortable, re-evaluating what your normal is, and putting yourself in situations that you don't want to fucking do. your normal is and putting yourself in situations that you don't want to fucking do. Yes. And we want it very fast. If you don't see results in the first two days or the first week, I'm done. That's the mentality of most people. Their struggle is too real. We're not patient. In a world where you can Google the best restaurants around me right now,

no one is patient. And for you to lose weight, for you to stop drinking, whatever the hell you're going through, it takes a lot of patience, a lot of time, and a lot of pitfalls, a lot of plateaus. You're going to hit so many fucking plateaus. If you don't know how to get around that plateau, it's not going to happen fast. Yeah, everybody wants the hack. Yeah, everybody wants the hack.

There is no hack, man. There's no hack. So what do you think is the biggest stumbling block that most people face with this kind of journey? Honestly, is they have the woe is me mentality. It's too hard. Life isn't fair. These things in life are not easy for me. You look to your left and you look to your right and you start to judge yourself off other people Like if you're a female, well, she's skinny. She doesn't work out as hard as I do and

Everything starts to corrupt your mind. You start to look around too much at other people what they're doing And that starts to corrupt your own dialogue We are judging ourselves against too many fucking people. You have to judge yourself against yourself. And that's the one thing I started learning, man. This isn't a race against me and Rich Roll. This is a race against David Goggins and David Goggins alone. And once you can silence all that bullshit, all the outside interference and things that are attracting your mind to everything, you can then start to grow and realizing, I'm stressed out for no reason. This is my own little race. This is my own timeline, and this is how I'm going to run it.

I think that so many people are so disconnected from themselves. They're operating on autopilot. They're reacting to their environment, that even when given the opportunity to set a goal for themselves, they generally don't set the right goal because they don't know what the fuck they're doing, because they don't even know who they are fundamentally. That's the big thing, man. And that's why it was important for me to finally realize, stop being all these fake people I used to be, stop being afraid.

me to finally realize, stop being all these fake people I used to be, stop being afraid. There was no growth until I cut myself down to nothing, to the person I really was, the real human being. And once I found out who I really was, that's when I started growing. I was trying to build on top of a lied, fucked up foundation. You can't build a house on a fucked up foundation. So I had to get down to the actual mineral soil of who I was. And that's when you can start real growth. And what is the role that suffering plays in that or the willingness to suffer? It starts to peel all those layers away, all those artificial layers away. If you're willing to suffer and suffer and

go back in the grind, that internal dialogue you have with yourself when you're in misery and you're uncomfortable, it's a real, scary, unfiltered, no-lying dialogue between you and yourself. And people know exactly what the fuck I'm talking about when you're in a bad spot in life And your mind is saying all kind of shit. That's who you really are That's the real you no rocky balboa moments going on up there Like hey, you know, it's around 14. Let's come on. We got this. No, it's like fuck this i'm out of here, man This is crazy That's where the growth happens when you're able to stay in that moment

And talk to yourself talk yourself back into the suck Of whatever you're going through and you start stripping those layers away But as you're stripping those layers away, you're building calluses over top of shit in your mind That's where the growth starts to happen is when you have to force yourself to stay in it You can't you can't leave it. That's why ultras are such a great vehicle for self-exploration. And that's why you see all of these cultures over the millennia that you talk about in

your book who use running as a means of self-exploration and a path to enlightenment because you can't bullshit yourself. It strips you down to who you are, and you are confronted with the truth of yourself and your reality, and you're forced to wrestle with that in a way where there's no escape hatch. No. Like that first 100-mile race I've talked about several times where I lost all, all, everything. Still the hardest physical thing you've ever done, right?

Yes, physically and mentally, because like you just said, I was unprepared for that race. No training. You should just recap it. Like zero training, running 100 miles so that you could impress Chris Gossman. Well, to get in the bad water pretty much, right? I went about impressing that guy by any means. Well, you needed him to sign off.

I needed him to sign off on it. And it was like three days later, I'm in a 100-mile race, no train at all. And when you do that, it is stupid. But what it does, if you're not going to quit it, like you just talked about, it breaks you down to nothing. You are suffering so badly mentally and physically that all of these demons are coming up. And you're trying to find answers. And you're trying to find answers.

It was like living 19 hours. It was like five years I put into 19 hours of highs and lows and pitfalls and seeing the sun come up. And it was like, my God, I lived five years in 19 hours. It was unbelievable. It was unbelievable. It was unbelievable. So do you find yourself chasing that now with every ultra challenge? No, because once you realize what you get from ultra, what you get from life, I can apply that now just by sitting here with you. You know, those tools now, I don't need to go out, even though I still do it, and go out and hammer. The hammering part is like a purging of the soul. You go out there and hammer out there.

You got to do that every once in a while. You got to hammer, man. You got to get after it. But now I figured out so many different ways and so many different tools through all of the journeys I've been through, through just growing up, man, just being really mature and not holding on to hate, really just letting all that shit go, man, and starting from scratch, and let's go, let's go forward. How do you let it go? I don't think enough about people that have wronged me

or situations that have wronged me. Because once you've come to a place where you are really happy with who you are in life, no one fucks with you anymore. Even though they're fucking with you. It doesn't fuck with you. It doesn't fuck with you. You know, like all these, I used to be so hurt by everything in the military. And if someone did something or said something, I'm like, man, I have overcome so much shit.

There's not, I'm just in a really good headspace right now. My headspace, I own it. A lot of people own other people's headspace. I own my own shit now. What do you mean own? They're just all caught up in what other people think about them and running all these narratives in their mind. That's right. They're more caught up in what other people think about them than how you feel about your

own personal self. So a lot of people have their brain and their mind on rent to a whole bunch of motherfuckers in the world. I am paying rent on my own shit. I finally put a down payment on it, and I'm making payments every daggone day on my own fucking brain. So you don't fucking control that shit anymore, man. I got it.

So walk me through a day in the life. What's it look like right now? Well. I mean, it's got to be crazy. Right now, I leave here and I fly out to Oregon and I'll be in Oregon with Cameron Haynes. We'll be getting after it for a few days. A lot more podcasts, a lot more interviews. But every day

every morning I get up I still get my run in every morning how do you structure the training? the training is basically structured off of my schedule so look at my schedule and I say okay

Jennifer what do we have today? we have this at 7 o'clock in the morning roger that that means I got to be up by 4 o'clock in the morning to run that. That means I got to be up by 4 o'clock in the morning to run. That's how it works. That's how all my shit works.

So she lays out the schedule of events. You just said it two hours earlier. She says it could take an hour to get to Rich Rolls. Let's say we were at 7 o'clock today in the morning. It takes an hour to get to Rich Rolls with no traffic.

Okay, let's block in an hour 15 for Rich Roll. Okay, we got that. The morning time, I'm going to run seven miles this morning. I need 52.30 for that. Roger that. Put in shit, shower, shave, add that in. So the schedule dictates, but I have all that time.

Push it back, right? So if that means getting up at 1.30. Trust me. Roger that. I've done that several times. Several times. How much sleep do you usually get? I like getting seven to eight hours of sleep.

Nowadays, I can do that. But there's times where the schedule says, hey, man, you're getting three hours. And if that's the case, Merry Christmas. One of the things I felt that maybe Joe Rogan didn't quite grasp was why you would go out and become this wildland firefighter at this stage in your life. Right. Yeah. He had a look on his face like, what the fuck? That's once again, going back to the roots, going back to who I am,

how I became who I am today. And it comes back from hard work. It comes back from having that very minimalistic mindset. And when you're out there, man, and you're 43, and I've accomplished a lot of shit, and you're out there with some 20-year-old kids, and you're nobody again, being nobody, there's a lot of power in being nobody.

There's a lot of power from going to scratch again and going back out there picking up a pulaski and just digging fire line you're just another guy on the line digging a fire line and no one ain't no there's no text message there's no my god david can you sign my book no motherfucker, motherfucker. Get your ass out there. It's like being in Army Ranger School again where all the titles are removed. Removed. That's exactly what it is, man. I've always lived that lifestyle. I always talk about living day one, week one.

I started day one, week one of Bud so many fucking times. When you hear that, your heart just crumbles like, fuck, day one, week one again, man. I could go through all that shit again. Like I said, it became my new norm. And I found so much growth in that day one, week one mentality. But what I did wrong, I tried to put that mentality on a lot of people, and they don't want it. Yeah. What do you think people most misunderstand about your story?

I'm not happy. The biggest thing is they say, look at his eyes. Look at his eyes, man. Have you seen his eyes? He has demons in his eyes. He looks so unhappy. That's a lot of projection. I see some of this shit. I think the biggest thing is

I'm not happy. I'm not fulfilled. All this shit. They think that the biggest thing is I'm not happy. I'm not fulfilled, you know, all this shit. They're so missing the point, man. What they see in me is a very focused, driven human being who found a buried fucking treasure within himself. Not many people found it. So the journey I'm on is very different than most people, which is why I don't judge people. I say that many times. I don't judge people.

I'm judged a lot by how I look, my eyes, my not smiling all the time, not laughing, not joking. And that's the big, I'm a funny motherfucker, big time. But guess what? Right now, it's easy to be happy. It's easy to be happy. It's easy to smile. Those are the good times. The good times.

Those times don't need to be trained. You know, I had to train myself for good times. Those times, for most people, don't need to be trained. What I'm trying to give you all is the misery of sometimes we go through in life. Those are the times we don't want to fucking talk about. We want to skip forward to peace. Let's just fucking fuck all this. Let's just skip all this pain and suffering and misery of real life. Let's cover it over.

Nice big blanket. And let's find peace. No. Sorry. It's not possible. You got to go into that fucking hellhole of life that you have that fucked you up and fix it. And that's what I'm here to do.

You got to go to war with yourself before there's peace. That's what I say in the book. That's what you say in the book, yeah. You must go to war with yourself before you find peace. So I'm trying to give you tools on how to do that. And I'm not considering a smile and be happy about it. It's a hard journey. It's a hard journey. It's a real journey. It's a journey that's going to take you way outside of being comfortable.

You'd be very, very uncomfortable doing it. But it's what we're here to do. You know what I mean? A lot of people don't see that. I love that story that you tell about showing up at the pearly gates and wanting to be evaluated based upon your potential. That's right. I believe we're here to grow and progress and evolve. And if you're not committed to that journey, then I think you're missing the beauty of life. And that doesn't mean it's easy because it fucking ain't.

It is the warrior's path, truly. 100%. But if you don't acclimate to challenging yourself and facing obstacles and becoming better on a consistent daily basis, then what the fuck are you doing? 100%. And sometimes you have to put the obstacle in front of you. That's why I went to be a firefighter. Right. So now life's good and easy. So you have to create these obstacles because the obstacle... That's the thing about it. I have no obstacles anymore, man. Life is good.

So I'm going to go up to Montana or Wyoming or wherever the fuck you go to go. I go to Montana. I said, here's my obstacle. So once your life gets easy and everything is great, it's time to go online and Google some obstacles to put right the fuck in front of you. And when you look back on your childhood and you think about your dad, do you find peace with that? Do you find gratitude?

100%, man. For me to start this journey, I had to go back to where it started from. And I came from that man. That man is a part of me. I had to accept that. Had to accept that a lot of my insecurities, why that man beat me, why that man beat my mom, why that man got in my head,

and everybody said he had a fucked up life. I had to study him. And I had to realize, I had to find peace with all that. I had to realize that what he did, like he hated me, he hated himself. And so once you start to grow up, and like I say, take a different vantage point, I had to forgive that man, even though I didn't say sorry.

He never said sorry. We had our last conversation at 22 years old, and he died about four or five years ago. That was the last time I talked to him at 22 years old. But he was able to see you become successful from a distance. I think it hurt him. I think it hurt him because he saw me become a man, a man that he was very proud of and he didn't have much to do with it. But once again, I didn't hate him for that. But he was the fuel beneath it all.

He was a lot of the fuel, man. But I will say this, anger was never my fuel. A lot of people think that. See, I would think that would be maybe a big misconception about you. It is. Because it's easy to look at you, and that guy is lit up on anger and resentment and rage. Even back in the day. So I got to say, I've never said this before. I was actually telling my fiance this the other day. People think anger was my fucking fuel.

Yeah, anger can be a fuel. Anger got me to look into things to become better i want to show him but i'll tell you one thing when you're suffering and you're fucking at the wit's end and you want to fucking quit that anger is gone brother well it's also not a sustainable fuel no your mind is thinking about let's get the fuck out of here. So I realized this anger ain't shit. I didn't think about my dad beat me up. I didn't think about kids calling me nigger. I didn't think about any of that shit. I thought about, man, this fucking water is cold as balls, man. I can get the fuck out of here. So I realized anger was no fuel for me. It may have got me to say, I'm going to be somebody. Anger got me caught up in

some serious ego trips, man. Yeah. And on the subject of sustainable fuel sources, motivation's not your favorite. Motivation is just... Oh, Goggins, he's so motivational. I'm so motivated. I'm so inspired. No, man. Motivation's just kindling, man. It's just kindling. All these fires that happen out here in California, man. So tragic what happened out here. But those fires start by a little motivation. And this is what I'm looking at, man. It's like a little spark starts these big fires.

It was so crazy. And that's why I look at motivation. Motivation is just a spark. But those little sparks, if somebody comes by real quick with some water, that fire is out. But if you come by and that little fire, no one touches it, and that little fire, which is motivation, which is kindling, and that kindling grows off to, like, they call it one-hour fuels, two-hour fuels, 10-hour fuels, 10,000-hour fuels,

you want that thing to boil over and catch a nice big log. It's going to burn a long time. And that big log starts catching everything on fire. This is your soul. So motivation a lot of times can be fucking just put some water on it, puts it out. That motivation needs to turn into drive, passion, obsession to what you want to become. And once you become obsession or driven, it's a fucking inferno. So now you got to call in tons of firefighters and call in for help from here,

call in for help from there, and they're not putting that shit out. Only thing that can take that thing out, it's got to burn itself out. But obsession is self-generated. You can't will another person to become obsessed. Not at all. That has to be something that is cultivated from deep inside yourself. Deep, deep, deep. Most people never

experience what it's like to be obsessed. I think we put a negative label on obsession. Hell yeah. He's obsessed. To me, it's a daggone compliment. It's a compliment, man. A lot of times,

it can fuck you up. It can ruin your life could be obsessed but i'll tell you one thing if you want to be great you want to be the baddest motherfucker ever at what you do you could be misunderstood by everybody because you're going to be so fucking obsessed and so driven to get there that's what it takes that's the truth takes every second of your fucking life. Anybody says balance? Yeah, balance is important for a lot of fucking people. It is. But if you want to fucking go to that edge

where people do not like you, don't understand you, question everything you fucking do, you've arrived. When you are misunderstood to the point where fucking people think you're psycho and you're nuts and you're this and that, why are you in the fucking gym at one o'clock in the fucking morning? You just got through doing an

op for fucking 13, 14 hours at the ranger school, man, at the gym. What is wrong? You will never understand what is wrong with me. And that's why I'm so fucking glad you don't because I'm in the right fucking spot. When people don't understand you anymore, you're in that spot of obsession and drive where people are like, what the fuck is wrong with this guy? I don't want to talk to you, man, because you're not going to get it. You're not going to get it. Boom. Don't want you to get it. Yeah. Don't want you to get it. Yeah, it's powerful, man. All right, well, we got to land this ship. But I want to leave people with a couple thoughts. This is going to go up on New Year's Day. It's the time of year where everyone's thinking about what they want their 2019 to look like. They should have been thinking about that a long time

ago. That's not the way it works for most people. So let's leave people, let's get them set on a good trajectory with a couple things to think about and execute on as they lead into January. I'll give you that, man. It's all about mindset. That's it, man. You have to change the dialogue within your head. And one thing I guarantee you, there's some stat out there about January 1. All that kindling that that you started all that motivation usually burn out by about 10 to 12 days later so let's see how far you can take that shit let's see if you can get a fucking challenge from goggins to you usually it's 10 to 12 days man people always coming man hey i want a workout program i no longer give them anymore because you're going to waste my fucking time

because I know most people out there once that fucking one alarm clock goes off the wrong time of the day I'm not going to the gym right or they get the workout program but then they're like hey they hit you up again what kind of watch do I need to get what kind of shoes

the question is keep coming every day goes by without anything going on keep coming go. Go to the store, buy a pair of shoes, and Merry Christmas. Have fun with that shit. Call me after you lose some fucking weight running your ass in the dirt, and then we'll work on some other shit. Right on. Get your base on. There you go, man. All right, cool. Pleasure and an honor, my friend. Hey, thank you so much for having me on again, Rich. I appreciate you, man. This is amazing. I cannot recommend this book more highly. Can't hurt me. Get the audio book, get the hardcover. It's available wherever you buy books. I'll put a link in the show notes to it as well. This book will fucking change your life. I promise you, man. And I'm no stranger to these kind of narratives.

And I thought, like I said at the outset of this, that I knew the story. I did not know the story. And I was profoundly impacted by it. And also just so great that our mutual friend Adam is part of this too. Oh, he's the man. He did a great job of capturing your voice. And I know this was a long journey with the two of you guys, but it came out on top, man. I went through a lot of ghostwriters. I don't even call him a ghostwriter.

That's a wrong word. Ghostwriter's your partner really on this. That's why the so-called ghostwriter was hand in hand right beside me doing the audio book. So he's a lot more than a ghostwriter. He was a guy that captured a very fucked up life and he captured that shit just right. Together, we captured some good shit. So it's a good read. It's a good read. Awesome, man. All right, dude. Until next time. Roger that. Peace. Roger that. Out. Absolutely insane, right? Are you pumped right now how pumped are you there's no way that you're not pumped after listening to that so please remember this feeling

bottle it go back listen to it again hold on to this and then put it to work that's the thing put it to work and you can begin this process by visiting the show notes on the episode page at richroll.com where you'll find all kinds of additional links, ways to engage with David beyond the podcast. And please waste no time picking up his new book, Can't Hurt Me. There's a link in the show notes to do just that. And you can follow him on Instagram or Twitter, but IG, that's where it's all happening for David.

Very inspirational. So check that out, at David Goggins. Again, we have a special limited time deal on our Plant Power Meal Planner. $20 off when you go to meals.richroll.com and use the promo code POWER20 at checkout now through January 8th. So don't wait and get your diet checked in

to meet those 2019 goals with our Plant Power Meal Planner. If you'd like to support our work here on the podcast, just share it with your friends or on social media. Hit that subscribe button on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, on YouTube, Google Podcasts, wherever you enjoy this content. Leave a review on Apple Podcasts, and you can support us on Patreon at richroll.com forward slash donate. I want to thank everybody who helped put on the show today. Very special thanks to Randy Perez for her amazing portraits of David that she gave us permission to use for this episode. So thank you for that.

Jason Camiolo for production, audio engineering, show notes, interstitial music. Blake Curtis and Margo Lubin for creating the video version of this podcast for the filming and the editing and for the graphics. Jessica Miranda for her beautiful graphics, which you can find on the homepage of Apple Podcasts, iTunes. Beautiful picture of David advertising this show. David Kahn for advertising relationships and theme music, as always, by Annalema. So thanks for the love, you guys.

See you back here next week with another return of a great former guest, the great Zach Bush, MD. It's so good. You guys are in for a real treat with that one. Until then, happy 2019, people. Peace, plants. Namaste. Thank you.