Jocko Willink - Creating An Unbreakable Mindset (4K)

there's going to be things in your life that you don't have control over human beings can control a lot more than they think they can and oftentimes it's pretty easy just to say oh that's not me that's not on me and people say that's not my fault there's nothing i can do about that and more often than people think there is something you can do about it and it is your fault chucklewood link welcome to the show thanks for having me appreciate it you flew to watch the ufc with cam haynes and chris pratt i

want to know what a night out with jocker willink looks like well actually i didn't fly up there with cam cam was already up there i think he flew in from oregon where he is where he lives but we did we did meet up there and but i did fly up there with chris pratt and jack carr and some of the other folks from the terminal list which is a tv show that chris pratt is in that jack carr wrote the book that the show was based on and we went up there watched the fights

it was it was a very cool night yeah it was fun what time did you get up the next day i got up i don't know but cam was giving me a hard time he says what you know what are you are you gonna get up tomorrow morning and i said i'm not even gonna get home until three in the morning and that's right that's when i got home i got home at three o'clock in the morning i think i got up around maybe eight eight thirty something like that the fact that you don't do

the 4 30 a.m thing after a night out makes me feel at least a little bit more mortal if it's gonna be less than four hours of sleep then i'll make some kind of adjustment you'll just push it the next day yeah what was it like to see the ufc live have you seen that before i've been to so many ufc's i don't know i don't know how many ufcs i've been to but i've been to a lot i spot i when i was younger i spent a lot of time coaching and training fighters so

i'd corner i've cornered a bunch of fighters in the ufc and so i've been to i don't even know how many ufcs i've been to but i haven't been in a long time i haven't been in probably three four years so it was cool to go and see one again and and get back up there ufc seeing the ufc live is is awesome and look you know people will say and even i'll say this too it's great to sit at home and you know get all the different angles and hear the commentary that's cool there's

there's a benefit to that but there is a lot of a lot of hype and a lot of energy that that's in the room or in the in the stadium when it's going on and so being there live definitely definitely is is is worth doing occasionally to make sure you don't forget what that what that's all about how do you handle the next day now if you've had a few drinks the night before i actually don't drink so uh you know that's really no factor for me you know i i drank a i drank more

than my fair share when i was in the military and then when i retired from the military and i kind of just over time over over time i just kind of wasn't drinking anymore now i just don't really drink anymore there's not much in it for me you know i'm a i'm an old man with i'm married with kids and businesses and all this other stuff going on so i'm not going to get much out of out of drinking anymore and a big price to pay the next day as well if you did decide to

do it maybe i guess i i sure i guess that that might be some of it but there's just i just don't i'm not getting anything out of it so two of the biggest elements in your life have been your military training and your martial arts training what would you say are the commonalities between the best bjj athletes and the best special forces operators that you've worked with there's uh probably the the biggest commonality between the two is some kind of strange contrast between being extremely disciplined and being extremely creative so clearly if you're going

to get good at jiu-jitsu you got to be the you got to be disciplined enough to train all the time same thing with being in the military if you're going to be a good operator you have to have the discipline to push yourself in training but you can't be a person that you know leans so hard towards a disciplined structured life that you don't have any creativity because both in jiu jitsu and on the battlefield you want to you definitely want to have be creative and figure out creative solutions and things that people haven't thought

of and things that the enemy is not going to think of or that your opponent's not going to think of so you got to find that person who has a good balance between discipline and kind of a wild freedom creativity that they can make adjustments it's interesting to think that more focus or more efficiency isn't always the solution to everything so i the analogy i'd use is if you think about an artist's creative studio where they need their creativity it's not orderly you know there's half coffees and easels and sketches and paint and all sorts

of stuff all over it what does that engender what's that environment creating for them but then when they need to go and file their taxes trying to file their taxes in that same room is probably not a good idea and i guess that flip-flop between off and on right between focus and play it seems like a very interesting thing to think about especially in a military context what what does that mean when you're talking about a special forces operator being creative you know there's a certain level of inside the military in general is if you're

gonna you have to be a person that kind of follows the rules and stays within standards and that's great and you're gonna you're gonna be a good solid soldier if that's what you are but if you have a mindset that's very that's so highly disciplined and so highly structured like i just said then you're not gonna think creatively when there's a problem that needs to be solved so you want to have people that don't mind the discipline and can actually access the discipline in a way that they can utilize it but you don't want people

to be trapped by discipline and it's the same thing in jiu jitsu if you have someone that only knows how to do a certain move and they can't think creatively about other ways to employ that it's not that they're not going to be good because they are going to be good but there's gonna they're they're gonna reach limitations and you know one of the interesting things in the seal teams is we didn't have especially when i was coming up we didn't have any doctrine whatsoever there was no there was no written doctrine of any kind

so everything that you learned was word of mouth you learned from the guys that went before you and that meant if the guys that went before you weren't didn't really know what they were doing you're probably learning a bad way and if you didn't think if you didn't think objectively about it then you might follow someone down a path that doesn't make any sense so you ended up with a bunch of guys in the steel teams that were pretty open-minded and they could kind of look at problems and figure out how to solve them in

the army and the marine corps they have doctrine for just about everything this is how you do a raid this is how you conduct an ambush they had written doctrine for this so if you didn't know how you could just look at a book which is actually a huge benefit for them because if i'm a new platoon commander and i don't know how to do an ambush i can just look at this book and i can learn how to do it and so there's some huge benefits to not to to having a very disciplined doctrine

that you can follow but that's one of the odd advantages of the seal teams is that since we didn't have any doctrine we had to be a little bit more free thinking and that made us a little bit more adaptive in in some situations so it's just like anything else your strength can be a weakness your weakness can be your strength and you have to be aware and if you're aware that it's a strength and if you're aware that it can also be a weakness and if you're aware that it's a weakness and you're aware

that it can also be a strength then you can probably optimize the way that you're going to think which is pretty beneficial do you think that can be trained that creativity yeah i think creativity can be trained it just like any other natural trait some people are going to have more propensity to be creative than someone else and some people are more rigid than other people in the way they think and you can take someone that's more rigid and you can make them more creative but everyone's gonna have some kind of a limitation and some

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

be somehow tied to creativity and looking at things in and saying hey that doesn't make sense to me so i'd say that i had a i'd say it was pretty a pretty strong degree of both of those things and that's what made me who i am well especially the music that you listen to as well growing up right i don't think almost all of the kids i know that grow up listening to metal or hardcore they've you can't listen to that and not have a rebellious streak in you yeah you definitely can't listen to that

and not have a rebellious streak in you and that that's that that did kind of drive my way of thinking a lot when i was growing up and and not only did it drive my way of thinking i think i found that kind of music because that's the way i was sort of engineered in the first place so yeah who are you listening to when you grew up bad brains black flag agnostic front crowmags black sabbath is my favorite band of all time yeah those kind of bands a lot of your work is it's focused

on encouraging people to take ownership and responsibility for things one of the things that i've been thinking about a lot recently is whether it's possible to take too much responsibility or too much ownership where you start to believe that you're at fault or you're accountable for things and blame yourself too frequently blame yourself too much you think that's possible there's a way that it can happen usually from a leadership perspective when people ask me this question hey can is it possible to take too much ownership the answer is yes and that is if i'm in

charge and you're working for me and i take so much ownership over a mission or over a project that you don't feel like you have any input at all then i've taken too much ownership as far as as like as an individual person there's going to be things in your life that you don't have control over and uh you know one of the one of the early questions that i got asked about this you know like for instance someone gets a terrible disease and you know or their kids gets gets a terrible disease a random

disease that's through no fault of anyone the kid gets sick or the person gets sick and no there's nothing you can do about that what you can take ownership though is how you respond to that situation and so that's what you have to do there's things that you can control there's things you can't control now i will tell you that human beings can control a lot more than they think they can and oftentimes it's pretty easy just to say oh that's not me that's not on me and i think that's that's the whole genesis of

the idea of extreme ownership is most of the time or much of the time people say that's not my fault there's nothing i can do about that and more often than people think there is something you can do about it and you can and it is your fault i i i find it interesting to think about uh it's not your fault but it is your responsibility as well and and how that sits in amongst this my concern with it is don't get me wrong i think that right now the vast majority of people need to

take more responsibility i think that it is a great counter to a victim mindset i think that it helps people with agency and sovereignty i can see elements in my life though of times when i've blamed myself for things which i'm in no way even remotely associated with so for instance let's say that i'm doing a podcast with someone or or i'm doing a live event right i'm facilitating some discussion and i ask a question and the guest fluffs the response like gives a poor response a lot of the time the first place that i

would go is that was on me somehow i should have asked a better question and even if i'd asked the absolute perfect question and you could roll that forward into a relationship you know that you're in a relationship with a bad partner or you something something occurs i just i'm trying to find that line of how people can balance it so that they don't end up putting so much pressure and weight on them that it crushes them yeah well here's two examples of what you're talking about you you mentioned one relationship another one is just

if you're working for me so if you're working for me and you don't show up on time or you're not professional when you're conducting your briefs i need to say something to you and i need to take ownership of the fact that i haven't made it clear that hey you need to show up on time and hey you need to be more professional and hey you need to wear the right uniform or or dress the part i need to take ownership of that and maybe if i do and i talk to you and we discuss

why it's important and you say i really didn't think about that and you change your ways and you get on board and you start showing up on time you start acting more professional it's great we solve the problem there's also a chance that you're late again or you show up you know with with booze on your breath or whatever and we're meeting with a client and i say hey chris you can't do this this is look i'm serious you cannot act this way this reflects bad on all of us and maybe and i might even

say listen if you keep this up you're not even working here anymore i'm gonna have to get rid of you you say i know i love working with you it's gonna be great i won't do it again and maybe that solves your problem or maybe you're late again or you continue to act on professionally then i'm gonna get rid of you i'm gonna say hey chris look i talk to you i try to explain this to you and at a certain point i this job isn't for you so that can happen and i i have

to take ownership of the fact that you are actually not capable of doing this job that i've asked you so that's fine same thing can happen in relationship right look if you're in a relationship with someone and you're bickering about where we're gonna go for dinner or you came home late from work and all you do is well i've been working all day you should respect the fact that i've been working on it like that's that's actually on you that's actually on you and you can make adjustments to that now can you get to a

point in relationship where the other person is not a good fit for you and at some point you say you know what i've made these adjustments i've come home you know on time i've texted you when i was going to be late and these these other things are coming up and you say you know what i don't think this is working and i don't think this is a good relationship so at a certain point you say okay i've made the adjustments that i can make and i have to take ownership of the fact that we're

not a good match so yeah there's there's plenty of times where taking ownership means actually solving the problem not continuing to to pour the problem down your neck every night because that's not very helpful to anybody so yes at a certain point you have to you have to make adjustments and you have to move forward there's a lot of similarities i think between your personal philosophy and jordan peterson's i know you've spoken to him a couple of times what have you learned from him well the the most interesting thing that i learned from jordan peterson

and i mentioned this the first time he came on my podcast was that you know he's a trained academic that studied this stuff his whole life and we came to a lot of the same conclusions about things and i just came to those conclusions through living and the experiences that i had and he came to them through studying this stuff in a very rigorous way and and the cool thing is luckily for me i had written books that sort of predated uh i got there first yeah i got that first it wasn't that i got

there first but i mean this these were the thoughts that i had i mean discipline equals freedom that book came out i think before i before jordan peterson was on the scene it's the book extreme ownership which is about taking personal responsibility what's about taking responsibility and you can definitely apply it to personal responsibility so luckily for me those those books kind of predated uh jordan peterson coming onto the scene and and doing everything that he did but again it's not like i created any of those things it's not like i created it before he

created and it's not like he created it before other philosophers had figured these things out so i'd say the most interesting thing about jordan peterson that i that i found and i think it was pretty interesting to him too was the fact that we both had kind of come to these same conclusions and we had lived very different lives i mean i'm sure there's more disparate lives that we could live but they're pretty different lives and that's that was a very interesting thing and it made me feel like well it made me feel good about

the fact that the things that i had figured out were in line with things that he had figured out and that means maybe there's a little bit more strength and universality to these things that i believed which which felt pretty good just gonna pause that do you wanna go and see if there's someone stealing things outside if there's someone stealing things can you let me know it looks like they're bringing things in that's the opposite it's nice to know or to think that something that's been proven in the field of battle or on the field

of play is backed up in academia right that someone can go through the annals of philosophy history and come to a similar conclusion as you yeah uh absolutely and you know the stuff the stuff that i say is in the bible the stuff that i say is in stoicism and and jordan peterson you know says the stuff that i say or i say the stuff that he says again i'm not trying to compete with jordan peterson on any level especially some kind of an intellectual level but we have similar thoughts about things and that predated

either one of us knowing who each other were so i think that's pretty cool why do you think people are drawn to advice that's telling them to do hard things kind of seems counterintuitive why do i think people are drawn to advice telling them to do hard things because i think p any person any human realizes that if you want some kind of a good outcome you're gonna have to work hard for it and if you and if you don't work hard for something you're not going to get an outcome that's really worth much well

that is the thing that separates the achievements on the other side of it right if it was easy everyone would do it if it was even easy everyone would achieve it so this is one of the things that i i try and rely on when training's been getting hard i ruptured my achilles a couple of years ago that sucked i wouldn't advise it as an injury generally yeah and it's like a random you know a lot of times people just do it you know getting out of their car or something i was playing cricket yeah

the most british way to snap into a very british way to snap your achilles for sure um during that during the rehab for that it's pretty just uncomfortable it's endless calf raises right which not fun and the discomfort that you feel and the pain the fear of it re-rupturing which is the number one thing you're doing it to have happen the thing that i went back to in my mind was this is why i'm here the discomfort that i was feeling the um effort the pain the sweat thankfully this was during covid so it meant

that if i had to do a workout every single morning for half an hour on just my carbs like what else are you doing right there's a pandemic going on um this is why you're here was the reminder it's like look this is the reason why the re-rupture rate is five to ten percent because people don't want to do this thing people don't want to do the thing because it hurts because it takes half an hour every single day for nearly 12 months it's a full 12 month recovery that's why this is why you're here

and i think that you're right i think that the selection is people deep down know that picking up heavy things physically psychologically existentially culturally is good for us and i think that that's why it's attractive i agree another thing that i think is that it's one of the reasons why people can become a little bit triggered triggered they can become a little bit uncomfortable when they see somebody else that's got a lot of discipline because i think deep down they know that if they had that thing that that would fix a lot of the problems

that they have in their life is this a dynamic that you that you've seen i'm sure that's a a bummer for someone to look at someone else that's working really hard and and achieving some positive things and they know that they're not maybe working as hard as they could be and they're not really achieving what they want to achieve i'm sure that stings a little bit another thing that jordan said recently is that the problem with twitter is that the price of being a prick has fallen to zero i feel like you'd agree with that

as well yeah yeah i guess i'd agree with that if you're gonna spend a bunch of time on twitter you're gonna you're gonna run into a bunch of people that don't like you and they're gonna say it and there's nothing you can do about it so and the ability for people's words and the consequences of those words to become detached as well is something that's only pretty recent i mean i mean i guess you could have sent a mean telegram 100 years ago yeah i i i would recommend that you don't let random bots or

people on twitter bother you that much that's that's my recommendation i i would recommend you you know the first time i kind of experienced that it was when i was on i was on rogan for the first time and the youtube video came out and i sat there with my oldest daughter who was probably maybe 14 or 15 at the time and i sat there and read these heinous comments about me and laughed but i mean it was kind of you know some were pretty good it was kind of funny so yeah i'm not i

i'm not getting bothered by somebody that wants to talk smack about me for whatever on twitter and also there's there's probably some truth to whatever they're saying you know they say i'm a big knuckle dragger yeah probably right you know they say i'm an idiot yeah there's definitely some of that what else do you swear much i don't think i've ever heard you swear i i don't swear a ton um and look when i there's a there's a term we have in america i don't know if you have this in in england but swear like

a sailor meaning people in the navy swear a lot and certainly when i was in the seal teams i probably swore every seventh fifth to seventh word that came out of my mouth especially talking to a seal platoon about something but no one i don't i don't swear a ton i mean if you listen to my podcast all the time you'll see that when there's an appropriate time to swear then i will but even it's interesting you know if you square it all the time it kind of loses its impact and so when i do

swear on the podcast people usually say oh he's this is this is an important thing business this is uh this is obviously a very very uh powerful emotion that he's feeling around because he just said a swear word so yeah but i don't swear a ton when i'm and even when i was in the seal teams i'd come home at night and when it's where i don't swear in front of my wife and i wouldn't swear in front of my kids so i would just turn it off and that's that it's like when you hear

sam harris swear if you ever hear him yes he's sprinkled very infrequently but when it happens okay yeah it's an attention-getter yeah i have a friend daniel sloss uh comedian uh and scottish so that combined is like a multiplying force and um i actually think that he probably uses more swear words than actual words they're just that salt bae guy it's kind of like that but just throughout every single sentence deprogramming i think is important it's something that i've really tried to work on you know just being a working-class lad from the uk is it's

part and parcel of the language perhaps is being in the seals listening back and especially hearing yourself speak a lot which you've done over the last six seven years or whatever i don't know there's something about it that i i just i would rather save it for the times when i need it yeah and there is if you're doing something like where people are going to listen to it sort of detached from the moment that you're living in then it's different as well so it doesn't have this it doesn't come across the same and you

and i having a conversation over lunch talking about whatever that that's different and you know those those words are a little bit more fitting in those situations but if you're watching the ufc yeah if you're watching the ufc but yeah yeah i i i look i don't really if people swear it's not it's not like a huge concern of mine i don't really care that much but maybe you could improve your vocabulary a little bit and use it and not always rely on the same five swear words yeah but some people use them well and

they're hilarious when they use them daniel daniel uses his spectacularly yeah i would say he's probably got a black belt in in swearing right on i want to revisit your good video for the people that haven't seen it it's a two-minute long edit that was released seven years ago on your youtube channel and it's got like nearly 10 million plays or something now and in it you're encouraging people to respond to setbacks and things that don't go well by saying good by leaning into the discomfort by seeing it as an opportunity was there anything you

think that people misinterpreted about that video or about good generally as a concept look if you take any idea and you take it to an extreme then that idea is going to become bad i mean even the idea of extreme ownership if you take it to an extreme where your as you pointed out earlier you're blaming yourself because your daughter got a disease or you're blaming yourself because your husband is abusing you like there's a point where you you think anything go too far and well you know i mean there's there's some pretty good memes

about that on the internet yeah there's some good memes about that on the internet oh crashed my car my dog died good yeah i needed a new car anyways so yeah take it to an extreme it can be it can become pretty silly or funny depending on how you take it but for the most part you're gonna run into challenges in life and if you curl up into a ball and complain about it that's not gonna help you and if you say okay cool good here's some adjustments i can make to move forward that's gonna

be a better move than then cowering is there anything that you wish that you'd added in i i don't know i mean i said it during one of my podcasts and my friend echo turned it into a video so so that's it if i wanted to i probably would have expanded on it or done something else um i don't know do you tell me did i miss something i don't think so i mean it's pithy and obviously one of as you've said there it's extensive not exhaustive as a solution and this is this is twitter

in a nutshell that you have to sacrifice um how explicit you're being for brevity right for being sufficiently succinct that people can understand it you can get it in in one minute 55 so that people can actually watch it and won't click off or whatever and people will then use the lack of detail to expand that out and say yeah dog died in the car crash and good right you you can see how that's easy to criticize but i i think overall there's this really great story actually it was about zeno of city and the

guy that founded stoicism and uh often he was criticized that he was very abrupt when he would speak to people when he was giving uh his because he was around in a time of the sophists right and sophistry was all about these big long extravagant um philosophical treaties and they would use these super super long words and stuff and what he found was that people didn't like the fact of how abrupt he was didn't like that and someone once criticized him for it and he said uh yes i am thank you if i could i

would even shorten the syllables as well and i like the idea of someone that uses brevity in an effective way and uh this sort of links in with something i've been thinking about recently which is to do with the outcomes that we get in life so all of the concerns that we have all of the sleepless nights and the neuroses and the overthinking and the confusion and the uncertainty and the self-doubt and all of that stuff all combined together i think probably net us about maybe five or ten percent better outcomes in life it's my

belief that most of the qualities that you have your integrity your virtue your discipline your hard work your growth mindedness your humor your resilience all of that are forces that are very very difficult for you to slow down and that once they've got started it's incredibly hard for you to stop them and what you're doing with all of the extra concern that comes over the top of that is just making your day-to-day experience of it a lot more miserable and i i've been thinking a lot about how can you how can you i'm all fatty

right the love of fate the love of the destiny that i have is the one that's going to come i understand that i have control over it i understand that i have agency that i have sovereignty that i can impact my destiny but also that all of the work and the effort that i put in previously is going to carry me through and if i've been successful so far that worrying about success going forward whether or not it's going to occur just it doesn't seem super smart and then relating that to good is that not

only do you need to or can you accept something and say that it is good you can also have the sense of resiliency that you know that you've got through something that's worse than this before how did you get on last time did you face something that was difficult but you're still here by virtue of the fact that you're listening to this you're still here and there's a part of that that makes me it makes me think about good is an active philosophy right it's actively saying something happens i'm going to lean into it i'm

going to be uh forward motion right and then the backup that you seem to have behind that as well is look at all of the things i've dealt with before look at all of the effectiveness that i've come through with previously i think that those two combined together are pretty powerful i agree speaking about speaking about motivation and stuff as well which is obviously kind of the other side of of what you do you know why i'm laughing right why because you were telling the story about this guy who gave really brief answers and then

you talked for six minutes and i said i agree so it's just having fun good man you and zeno i've got a lot in common maybe do you think that people over complicate motivation yes i find that discussions about motivation a lot of the time i mean you are the uh soundtrack to a lot of motivation compilation uh video that's right yeah uh motivation universe 40 minute get up and get after it jocko video um so i i think that a lot of the discussions about motivation can cause people to believe that there's some magical

state that they need to be in before they do something yeah and as i've said since day one it's motivation is a feeling that comes and goes and it doesn't matter whether it's there or not discipline is infinitely more important so no matter how you feel get up and do what you're supposed to do that's it and that's discipline it's not motivation if you only did what you were supposed to do when you were motivated to do it that's leaving it to chance but if you're disciplined you go to what you're supposed to do that's

the way it works i went and listened to an episode you did with sam harris seven years ago now long time ago he came up with this a really interesting idea where he said that you can't fake courage that's one of the most interesting ways to look at it he said that courage or bravery i think is actually what he was talking about you it's an emotion that you can't fake if you fake bravery when you're terrified that is bravery and i kind of feel like motivation is the same thing if you do the thing

when you're feeling unmotivated that is motivation that's it so are you saying that all of the jocko videos of motivation they can just go off of youtube well i i i say in a lot of those videos and sometimes that's what it takes for people to get motivated is to realize that that motivation doesn't matter it doesn't matter it's a self-defeating video just shut up and go do what you're supposed to do yeah i mean the difference between the person that spends all day weren't wondering about whether they should go to the gym or not

and the person that just goes to the gym or not even if they both go they net out at zero apart from the fact that one person has spent the entire day obsessing over it yeah and probably wasting some brain power on it there's this thing called the bro science called the anxiety cost so you know opportunity cost right that you because of doing one thing you can't do another thing anxiety cost to me is the wasted mental effort that you go through obsessing over something when you could fix it quite easily by just doing

it it's one of the most compelling reasons for doing a morning training workout for me if you go to train every day ev every morning when you wake up your daily to-do list resets right you get out of bed and then your to-do list of meditate and walk the dog and answer emails and do all that the sooner that you can front load that stuff the rest of the day is just yeah discipline equals freedom that's it i mean if you have the discipline to get up and get the things done well i i've i

usually i often tell a similar story this is the same thing that you just said which is you know the weekend where you really only had two things to do for the weekend whatever it was you had to write this thing and you had to answer this other thing and on friday you're like i'll do it tomorrow and on saturday like i'll do it and it's basically hanging over your head the whole weekend whereas if you're just done friday afternoon the whole weekend would have been a lot better so just do the thing i agree

with you just do it just do this just do the thing man what does courage mean to you is that a good definition from sam do you think doing doing the thing in spite of the way that you feel yeah i think that's i think that's solid i i i somebody asked me a question the other day does courage have to involve risk and i thought about it a little bit i haven't thought i don't sit around and think about a lot of stuff which might be obvious i guess but yeah i think if you're

gonna if you're gonna get credit for courage then there has to be some level of risk whether it's you know capital risk and doing something in business or physical risk if you're doing something to run into a fire to save somebody yeah so i think i think courage has to have some kind of risk involved and then yes i agree with sam harris when he pointed out that if you're acting if you're doing the thing then that's courage no matter how you feel inside your your little brain are you sure that you don't spend that

much time sat around thinking of stuff because i know that you you do a ton of prep for each of your podcast episodes and as you're reading through a book i mean the insights that you pull out of that that you drag across between i think you might be doing yourself a bit of a disservice there well yes when i'm reading a book i'm certainly applying the context of my life and my experiences and what i know and what i think i know to that so i guess but but that's different than sitting around and

thinking oh you mean like the the sort of the stroking i don't do a lot of that maybe i should do more i probably need to i'd be interested to see that i could see you sat in a smoking jacket somewhere cigar yeah i mean you you know i i i think when i run i think when i'm doing jiu jitsu i surfing yeah i think when i'm surfing and those are just that's that's a great kind of empty mind and and there's times where i'm running and i have to stop and write something down

you know i'll pull out my because i'll be listening to some music or something i'll stop and take a note in in my iphone about something that i just thought of so it happens courage is very hard to find when life gets comfortable for people how can they stop their bravery from eroding when times are easy i guess i guess what we already talked about do something that's hard and do it every day that's what's one of the nice things about jiu jitsu you're going to get choked you're going to be uncomfortable you're going to

get smashed you're going to have to tap out your ego is going to get abused your go do that go do that go for a run lift just do hard stuff and that's a good way to keep that i guess fresh you think that maps across onto other areas of life as well it certainly seems like it does but there's no guarantee on any of this stuff really there's no guarantee and it depends on what you know what kind of courage you're talking about are we talking about courage where you're gonna die or you could

possibly die or you you know is that what we're calling courage because there's people that have come from every walk of life that have stepped up in that situation and there's people that have come from every walk of life and have failed in that situation so if you're talking life or death yeah i mean i think you actually have to get someone that is sort of good with dying and they're okay with it and then they're gonna have a lot easier time pushing into that fold if it shows up have you seen those detroit self

defense videos uh yeah i i think oh i know i have i'm trying to think how i saw him but yeah cause a lot of jiu-jitsu people will will repost those things yeah what what do you think that people misunderstand when it comes to life and death fights street fights what do you think most normal people who haven't been in one misbelief i don't know what that has to do with those detroit videos those detroit videos are definitely uh it's a pantomime yeah so i i guess so i guess what to answer your question what

do most people not understand about a street fight they're probably not used to just the level of violence that's going to occur they're not there maybe this is maybe this is what you're getting at with the detroit uh self-defense videos or whatever they are the choreographed maneuvers that you that work when you and i are going through them and sort of dancing those aren't going to work in real life and so if you think that you're going to be able to drop someone with one punch or you think all those things that that that are

sort of the old traditional martial arts doing kata and i you know i do this to you and it causes this reaction then my next move is over here yeah this stuff doesn't really work in a street fight just yeah the groin kick and the palm of the hand to the nose to run away from the the female to run away from the attacker and stuff like that yep it's not going to work well and it's not very reliable if you want to learn how to fight you got to learn how to fight you know

you got to do jiu jitsu muay thai wrestling boxing that's what you need to do if you want to learn how to fight have you been to go and see what tim kennedy's doing i at his place with his self-defense courses i have not been to one of his courses it's called sheepdog response but i've seen what he's doing and of course you know tim's tim's a not only is he well versed in martial arts clearly he's also well versed in weapons and he's also well versed in violence and so i know what he's teaching

is legit stuff i'm pretty sure they're using live handheld tasers as well during that to just show people precisely how difficult it is to whatever do the the face palm and the eye gouge and the fish hook and run away and uh i think he runs i think he must be monthly he does a special one for not military personnel for um the police and um even them the amount of training i think i mean we've seen this recently right that the training seems to be insufficient yeah the training for police officers is totally insufficient

and it's it's horrible because it's a very difficult job that you should be training i i've been saying for the last several years that police officers should train 20 of the time 20 of the time that they work they should be training and right now it's not even it's probably not even a measurable percentage of time that they're working i mean it's probably in the fractions of a percent that they're training they get horrible training and they're in really dynamic situations and in doing an incredibly hard job you don't know how to do that stuff

you know you talk about the misconceptions of the street fight is the person that thinks well you know when i if someone messes with me i'm just going to get wild and they think that's going to work and that's not going to work especially against someone that's trained so if you think that you're going to have some magical powers because you're angry or because your adrenaline's going that's not that's not true and it's going to it's going to cost you in a big way especially if you come up against somebody like tim kennedy who's genuinely

trained oh for sure yeah and you know this day and age well i mean i live in san diego california a lot of people train a lot of people train i wouldn't say it's the majority of people trained but there are a lot if you get in a fight in san diego there's a decent chance you're fighting against someone that knows how to fight and look there's jujitsu on every street in san diego jiu jitsu academies so yeah if you just think you're going to be a tough guy it's it's going to be rough it's

going to be a rough tour i saw a video the other day that you may have seen as well of tim talking about changes he was making to his everyday carry you see this uh i don't say i don't think so he was changing the uh weapon that he was using the pistol um because recently some of the active shooters have been using body armor so he's now gone to a relatively small caliber but uh armor-piercing round are you concerned about this increasing sophistication that seems to be coming from people that are shooters yeah there's

a little there's an escalation there right but that's uh the the military went through this with the people we were fighting they start wearing body armor cool roger that you want to wear body armor we'll we'll get arm repairing rounds you know the the it it's just a natural escalation of things unfortunately but it's the way it is it's kind of like the predator prey dynamic right of evolution yeah yeah the the enemy's gonna make adjustments and we're gonna have to adjust back what are your principles for an everyday are you allowed can you have

an everyday carry in in uh san diego yes right what are your principles that you follow for for that the the same as a normal person that wants to protect themselves well we had this recent fourth of july shooting right and then before that we had eval day and then before that we had buffalo have you got any idea if this is the sort of thing that can be stopped or can be restricted in some way yeah i did i did some podcasts on these things and some of the the biggest or i would say

one of the most startling things and about as you watch the evolution of this so in in 1955 in america there was 340 inpatient beds for people with mental health issues per 100 000 people so for every 100 000 people in america there was 340 inpatient beds for those people from people with mental health problems in 2007 it was 17 beds per hundred thousand so their the the mental health capacity for treatment in america has gone down in what 95 and the re and there are some legitimate reasons why this happened and a lot of

it had to do with the fact that people were getting put in these institutions and they there were some horrible abuses that were going on in some of these mental institutions people being committed that didn't want to be in there people that were abused once they were in there people that could never get out of there and there was a backlash against that and it all of a sudden became in the 70s hey this this mental health these mental health facilities are evil they're bad there's abuse going on we need to shut them down and

they shut down a lot of them and so in doing that it certainly appears to me that they threw the baby out with the bathwater and now we've got i mean you think san diego there's two or three million people here there's a lot of people that need help that need help mental health help and there's just not a great place to get it you know i talk police officers a lot police officers come upon people all the time that they don't need to get put in jail they need to get put in some kind

of a mental health facility but they don't exist and so they go into jail for a little while they they come back out and it's a problem so so if you take just the numbers of the beds right what has that done to all the other aspects of mental health like all what about the outpatient people how many doctors used to be ready to help somebody that was feeling depressed or was feeling angry there probably were a lot more doctors back then that had the capability of treating those things so we've we've really shut down

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

in in the coming months and years we can start to get back to a place where we start to build up our capacity for treating help people that have mental health issues because these these shooters in these scenarios they clearly are they have mental health problems it's a trend as well that's dominated by young men it seems and that that seems especially sad because these are men that could be out working a job or starting a business or being in the armed forces contributing to something and instead they're off on a rampage somewhere it's horrible

to see one of the differences we were talking before we started about the differences between the us and the uk i've spent a lot of time late nights in city centers working night clubs and um i've spent a lot of time around homeless people at two in the morning the only people that are out are club promoters and and homeless people and party goers and uh the difference between homeless people in the uk and homeless people in the us is more stark than the difference between the cultures by distance they are significantly more antsy uh

evidently um in discomfort and and talking to themselves shuffling along uh rocking backward and forward much more forthcoming significantly more forthcoming significantly more aggressive even though i've never had anything super bad happen uh downtown san diego downtown denver downtown austin i haven't spent a ton of time in america but i mean there are a lot of them and the safety net that we have in the uk to sweep up people who fall through the cracks like that is it it seems to work right you know someone someone ends up in a really bad way mentally

away you go will pop you into a ward you'll be looked after we'll be given the medication that you need there's no insurance that restricts that but as you said earlier on it's like a vicious cycle of the people who are the ones that are the most vulnerable are the ones that maybe get sent to jail perhaps to get hooked on drugs the drugs make their mental health conditions worse which means that they can they've further ingrained themselves into a life of either crime or homelessness which takes them further away from a job in a

balanced life and yeah i mean it kind of doesn't surprise me but it's it's pretty sad to see yeah i'd be interested to know the numbers of of inpatient beds per 100 000 in the uk because if you think about the homeless people that you've seen in san diego and there's two million people here right there's a lot of those people that probably would be swept up and put into a place where they're getting the right mental health treatment that they need and mental health treatment is not an easy thing to do it can take

an extended period of time to get someone sorted to a point where they're able to be go out and contribute to society so yeah i'd be interested to know those numbers and even from what you're saying right now my guess is england's probably doing a better job of getting people the help that they need how long have you been married now i think 25 years and you met your wife in bahrain right yep you remember the story about the first thing that you said to her yes would you tell that uh yeah so i was

on a on a deployment in the navy i was on a ship while we were on a ship this is back before internet on ships and we to occupy our time when you're a seal on a ship there's nothing to do you don't have a job so you just sleep eat and lift is our joke and you can only sleep eat and lift so long and then we we had a certain selection of movies on videotapes and so one of the movies that we had was aceventure a pet detective with jim carrey and so we

did a lot of imitating ace venture a pet detective and when i so we eventually went to bahrain my the other squad there's two squads in the seal platoon the other squad had actually gone to bahrain before us squad two went to bahrain for a few days they were ahead of us and we didn't know anything about bahrain we didn't know what was going on there because there's again there's no internet you just know some going to some random place in the desert and squad one had work to do so we stayed on the boat

for a couple extra days and then when we finally flew to bahrain squad two was waiting for us and they were they were saying hey this place is like there's good times to be had there's bars and girls and the whole nine yards and so they had like they were staged and ready to take us out and yeah we went to a bar and i know a big giant packed kind of club slash bar and and i saw a tall beautiful blonde woman and actually actually one of my friends in squad two had said to

me oh there's these two girls you're gonna be he's like i know you're gonna talk to him and he was kind of a shire guy and i said i'm sure it would work out with you man you're you'll do fine and sure enough i walked in this bar saw my saw my future wife and i just i walked up to her and i said in like a jim carrey tone i said uh should i just call you aphrodite's goddess of love and she looked at me like i was an idiot which was accurate and then

you know i bought her a drink and the rest as they say is history how did you save that i i want to know how you turned that opening line around you know it was i did it in a ridiculous enough way that she could probably tell i wasn't taking myself too seriously i mean it it wasn't serious right so if you're not being serious she laughed and we were good i didn't i didn't say it i didn't say should i just call you aphrodite goddess of love no if i would have said that i

probably wouldn't have ended up with her but i was having fun what have you learned since being married to a brit is there anything that uh you think has been a unique insight you know britain england the uk long allies with america even though i guess originally it didn't start off that way clearly look the fourth of july was a very difficult day for me yeah it was a very difficult day happy treason day to all of the ungrateful colonialists uh no i i i love the historical aspects of england uh you know the the

the the military that i've worked with the brits that i've worked with kind of to me represent what i think of when i want when i think of england and when i the way i the way i kind of hold england and the uk in an elevated way in my mind the the british military that i've worked with have maintained that standard completely professional stiff upper lip squared away ready to work and just just just the really just professional and that's the way i always think of england i'm interested here in the disciplining process of

getting married and becoming a father because you were someone who had already worked hard on being disciplined but this feels like a very different type of discipline to the discipline to put up with a baby that won't stop crying it's the discipline to be able to comfort somebody while you're away from them that to me feels like a different sort of frequency of of discipline and i'm interested in [Music] what you found as a challenge and what you found as um whether your military career had uh prepared you for marriage and fatherhood effectively well first

of all uh insane amount of credit goes to my wife who is just she well one of the things i've tried to explain to people about her is that she was emotionally independent meaning she didn't need me to to bolster her up and she handled everything she handled everything on the home front literally everything and i would just go and go do my job and she never complained about that she never made any comments about it it was she knew kind of the priority for me was my job and that later on in life and

and that strategically in our lives the the priority was the family but she also knew that while i was in the seal teams that was my number one priority she knew that and i told her that and she said yeah i know i get it do you take care of your team you take care of your platoon you take care of your task unit and i got this i got these kids and this house and all that other stuff and she never complained she never she just she just did it and so the the majority

the vast majority of credit goes to my wife for being an awesome human being an awesome uh mom to our kids and i was i would love to give you some kind of this is what you need to look for and that's probably the best i could do but i can't say that i looked for it i got very very lucky i i got very lucky that my wife was was look you can judge her looks and i obviously she was and is a beautiful woman but the luck part was she was like i said

emotionally independent she was strong to be able to handle just just mayhem mayhem on a pretty regular basis you know not you know from from having a bunch of kids to i'm gone on deployment and my wife is going to visit my wounded guys in the hospital or going to my guy's funerals that's what she was doing so [Music] you know team effort for sure but she's the mvp and i'm just sort of you know the the the bench the bench warmer over here the the now all that being said the the you know from

the military look taking ownership of things which which i already talked about a little bit but there's nothing really that goes on in my family that i don't that that i would say no to my wife no that's your fault because i can just about guarantee that everything is my fault when when there's something that's not right when there's something going wrong it's something that i it's a mistake that i made i did something wrong de-escalation right because my wife while borderline saint there you know she's a human being a lot of my friends would

argue that she's just a saint but she is a human being and you know she might get mad about something she might get frustrated with me about something and being able to de-escalate those situations and not not escalate them is very very beneficial and one of the best ways to do that is by taking ownership when something goes wrong so i would say the de-escalation part taking ownership is definitely beneficial if you're blaming your your wife you're probably that's not going to work out great and and just the idea of you know trying to win

trying to win an argument i mean first of all honestly i don't really are i i don't really argue with my wife i probably have been in less than a handful less than three or four arguments in my life with my wife and i can't even i can't even really think of anything right now i just don't want to you know try and try and make myself out or make our relationship out to be something that's not but we don't really argue very often and so i can't even really say that hey don't try and

win an argument with your wife because i'm not really having an argument with my wife um i guess my i guess my synopsis of this is pay attention to who you're going to get married to and try and pick someone that is emotionally independent that has their own has their own that can handle life by themselves and that that can be that can make some people feel insecure right like i want someone that's relying on me all the time and i want them to feel like they need me and that might be a trap for

you if that's what you set yourself up with so that's what i do find someone that's emotionally independent find someone that you get along well with find someone that's that's um calm you know someone that's not you know that's not going to get get bent out of shape about little things and if they do a little de-escalation can kind of get the problem solved and then just uh have fun you know my wife and i have fun and i think that's important it's very interesting to think about the fact that some people rely on a

partner who is overly vulnerable or overly anxiously attached as a way to bolster their own sense of reassurance in a relationship i've seen this quite a lot yeah that's probably not going to be a great move and look you a person i don't know everyone all i can do is talk for myself and i would recommend you find someone that's more you're equal someone that you can engage with someone that's someone that you're part of a team with rather than someone that you're sort of domineering over i learned this the other day that there's only

one sentence in the bible about how you should choose a partner and it says that you should choose someone that you could go to war with i like it that works that's legit it's a team effort a relationship right and would you purposefully choose a particularly vulnerable teammate because you're always going to be the person that's out in front probably not yeah yeah now to push back a little bit about that look you you there's guys i would be number one on my list to go to war with that probably are not going to be

the best spouses in them you wouldn't get in a relationship with them they're they're going to be they're going to be tough for for a female to be married too because they're they're wild right they're wild animals and they're the exact type of person that you would want to go to war with and that i've gone to war with and a lot of times they're they're not going to be great as as husbands fair point yes yeah people as well i've been thinking recently i spoke to andre huberman last week and he was explaining to

me about the similarities between the grief process and the breaking up process apparently neurologically it's incredibly similar it's a distance in time and space and something else i think and he was talking about how when you go through a breakup it is the same [Music] networks that are activated as through grief and as somebody that has been to probably far more military funerals than we can remember or would have liked to how does that inform your advice for people letting go of people that they lose in their life whether that be through a breakup or

or through them passing i talked about this on my podcast one time and speaking of jocko videos that are out there and people have made videos of this yes i have definitely lost too many of my friends and it took me a little while to start getting pattern recognition on what what happens and it's a very clear pattern and once i kind of put that out there i've now heard from many many scores of people that yup that's what it feels like and i think if you know what it's going to feel like just like

anything else if you know what to expect then it's easier to contend with so it's like a storm that is hitting you you know you lose someone someone that you know dies you are going to get put into a storm and what's scary about it is it's it's an emotional storm and you have no control over it so you're gonna break down start crying you're gonna remember bad things good things you're not gonna be in control of your emotions which is very difficult for adults because we're used to having some level of control over our

emotions so for a period of time you're gonna get hit with waves of emotion that you have no control over and they're gonna knock you off your feet and you're not gonna be able to finish a sentence you're gonna it's it it's very very difficult but over time that storm is going to fade a little bit and those those waves are going to get weaker and and those waves still may come so i don't know if you've lost anyone that's close to you no which is one of the reasons that i'm i'm an only child

two parents like dogs dogs is it so i have a particular um interest right so there's gonna be times where it's been a month since your friend died and you're gonna be sitting there and you're gonna hear a song or you're gonna smell a burger that you you you once had with this individual and you're gonna get overcome with those waves of emotion again and you might start crying right there you might have this massive wave of emotion hit you and it'll and then it'll subside and over time the waves will become weaker and they'll

become less frequent and and here's where people also get into trouble they think that that means that they didn't care about that person and that's not true at all it's just that your mind is processing it and it's okay so that's what happens you start off with this huge uncontrollable emotional storm that storm will pass that's number one just know that that storm is normal and it's gonna pass and then it's gonna still hit you but over time those waves of sadness and sorrow are gonna get weaker and they're gonna get less frequent and that's

okay that's a good thing and look i haven't broken up with a with a girl in a long time but i you know when when people ask me about breaking up with girls is you know i've what you have to do when it's not working with a girl is wish them luck to give them the best of luck wish them luck walk away and don't look back and you're still going to get those emotions those things are still going to hit you but walk away and don't look back and there's two reasons for that number

one if there's any chance that it's going to work out the best possible way for you to get it to work out is by walking away by wishing them look walk away and don't look back that's the best way how so because if there is something there then she will let you know eventually and if there's nothing there you're gonna know that too because you never hear from her again that's fine the protocol for getting her back is to walk away and don't look back that's the protocol is to move on the protocol if she

doesn't want you back is to walk away and don't look back so i look and i know it's hard but you'll you'll get some of those waves but those waves will become less frequent and they'll become less powerful and eventually you can move on and then you know the last thing i'll say about this is in both these scenarios is remember but don't dwell so you got you look you remember your friends you honor your friends you remember what they gave you what they taught you what you learned from them what was great about them

what you miss about them you remember all those things but you don't dwell in the past and and dwell on those thoughts and dwell on the loss all the time because that's not healthy either and it's not not going to help you it's not what your friend would want you to do anyways i like the insight around when you are going through grief and then you stop the sense of guilt that comes through because you feel now somehow that you're doing a disservice to their memory like you didn't really care or something like that yeah

it helps to you know it helps to write about what i've told people to do is write that personal letter and tell them what you loved about them what you're going to miss about them how you felt about them what you regret you write all that stuff in a letter put an envelope bring it to their grade and put it there and and that will help you process as well i mean i've unfortunately or fortunately i've i've given a bunch of eulogies for friends that i've lost and in the beginning i didn't really recognize that

that's a way of healing but certainly writing down your emotions your feelings what you're gonna miss what you loved about them is very therapeutic and it's very good and so that's another thing i recommend is you write that stuff down and and you you bring it to him that's another petersonism from his rules for life he says if memories still make you cry write them down yeah that's a you know i talk a lot about being able to detach from your emotions and it's very important well when you write something down you are literally detaching

from those thoughts because they're going out on a piece of paper that then you can see so it's a very important thing to do to write down if there's emotions that you have to deal with write down and i'd just like to give someone some kind of an objective so instead of just saying write down the emotions no here's write that person tell them and that will kind of be like a writing prompt to get you to write the right things about that situation i'm pretty interested in your impact on kids so i had a

comment uh from a father saying how much he couldn't wait for this episode because his son's read all of your books and we're timing my nine-year-olds mile run times every week because of jocko so if if nothing else there is a nine-year-old out there with his dad stood at the stopwatch as he sprints around a park on a saturday morning or something at the moment what what business does a seal have writing kids books well i don't know necessarily if any seal has any business doing anything i know that i have four kids and that

i wanted to when i was raising my kids there was there wasn't really any books that carried the message of the values that i wanted my kids to have and so i just wrote my own and there you go pretty straightforward is that similar to you uh do you think entering into the is it a reflection there from the seals the fact that there wasn't a guidebook or a handbook uh for operations when you first came in and you've almost had this twice you've had this in uh both your career and in fatherhood as well

yeah like there is there are some weaknesses to not having doctrine and there's also some strength when you do have doctrine and you know you know that boiled down to l i was very lucky that i joined the military because when i joined the military it it was i i had a structure a pathway to execute on and that's very very beneficial for a young idiot kid that's filled with energy and rebellion and aggression that's that's awesome here take all that energy and aggression and rebellion and and focus in this direction it's going to be

beneficial and you'll actually get rewarded for it you'll get promoted for it that's amazing and kids didn't really have any kind of a code where hey these are some general rules that will that you will benefit from in life and so there you go that's the warrior kid what about kids or the parents of kids that are being bullied in school this to me seems like a very unique challenge generally for people to come up against because a lot of the time you're able to have an impact on a situation you're able to do something

that moves it forward but you know you can go and have a conversation with the head teacher or whatever but that doesn't necessarily fix culturally sort of what's going on within the school there's only so much that teachers can do in terms of oversight you can't go into the school and punch the other kid in the face but that's also not the solution as much as you might want to do that well it's not going to help your kid any either right you you have to train your kid to be able to contend with the

world not tell your kid that you're always going to be there to back them up and beat up anyone that gets in their way like that's not going to help your kid become a better human so no what you want to do is teach your kid what you want to do to actually teach your kid how to fight you want your kid to train jiu jitsu you want your kid to train boxing you want your kid to be an actual force to be reckoned with and and what's crazy about this is you know as you

mentioned earlier if there's a bigger a much bigger person than you they can still beat you up you know and that's the thing with kids you know if you're 10 years old you can be a really well well-trained 10 year old but a 14 year old is probably going to get the better of you and maybe 15 year old but there's still going to be situations that it's going to be you're going to lose a fight that being said the risk for the bully goes exponentially higher when he knows that he's got someone on his

hands that can actually actually knows how to fight and so the probability of bullying taking place goes way down way down and even if that bully wins the fight he's not going to look good it's going to be a problem he he's going to he's going to get a a vic a worthless victory because he's going to beat up he's going to barely get the better of someone that's a lot smaller than than the bully himself so and all this stuff all this stuff i guess we could talk to andrew huberman but this is stuff

you recognize there's a there's a primal recognition of someone that knows how to fight and someone that doesn't and this is this is kids can recognize this they recognize oh i'm getting in this kid's face and he doesn't seem to be bothered by this and he's got a little bit of a smile on his face i might not want to push this any further and and that's a real thing so jiu-jitsu boxing wrestling muay thai will elevate that primordial confidence in a young man or a young boy or young girl that is going to prevent

so much bullying from happening that it's incredible so look can you still get beat up yes you absolutely can are you probably going to do okay yes you most likely are is your now what's what's lame is you know if you go back pre-ufc there would be martial arts instruction that would hey we're going to help your kid with their confidence and they would kids would get more confident but it wasn't based on reality you know going back to the detroit you know your friend at the detroit defense tactical or whatever you're calling my friend

going back to that guy he's teaching things that might help someone's confidence but they're not going to help in real life yes so is that potentially even more dangerous oh it's it's infinitely more dangerous because a kid that knows jiu jitsu a 10 year old kid that knows jujitsu and and there's a 14 year old kid that kid knows hey even though i know jiu-jitsu it's gonna be a problem this kid's a lot bigger than me he's probably stronger than me and this is gonna be a problem i need to figure out a way to

de-escalate this as opposed to getting told hey all you have to do is this strike and that that strike and then you'll win a fight no that's actually not true so yes that is more harmful to have somebody with fake confidence that that's a real problem but in training and in becoming stronger and being able to do pull-ups and being able to run you know for the young kid that's running that kid's got some good cardio if he's time in his mile runs right all those things are gonna help make a more capable human who

is a lot less likely by the way he's more confident guess what else he has when he's more confident he's got more friends his friends are now looking at this bully going hey man you don't want to mess with our friend and now we have a situation where it's probably going to get de-escalated just because of of school yard politics and primal politics that that play out between any group of human beings i'll never forget when i was in secondary school one of my friends carl his grandad was a judo teacher and had been for

a very very long time and carl had done it since he could walk as soon as he walked he was he was doing judo and he's now 14 15. there's a one of those kids in school that must have hit puberty at nine or something and this guy's huge and he was one of the the big bullies in school and i'll never forget that he squared up to him and carl was grinning in his face smiling in his face just couldn't wait for something to happen and i think that that kind of highlights one of

the main differences getting in a fight is probably not that bad as a kid in fact it could be a useful formative experience to make you um to educate you in the future about what it feels like to be in a physical altercation with people the thing that's concerning is the fear around the fight right it's the anxiety and the worries about the bullying so in a way yes the skills you need to have the skills that actually back up you don't want to have a reality which is detached from what you predict is going

to happen but one of the most important things is to just feel comfortable in a situation that is going to become dynamic 100 uh you know i i tell this when i start talking to women about self-defense if you have never had someone grab hold of you the mental hurdle you have to get over just to be able to respond in an adequate way is immense that mental hurdle is immense if you do jiu jitsu someone's grabbing a hold of you 27 times a day on the mat they're grabbing your neck they're grabbing your arm

you're totally used to this to this close proximity combat that you're entering into so yes a huge benefit of training to fight is that you don't have any mental hurdle to get over your friend that trained judo his whole life he was just ready to rock and roll at that point there's no fear whatsoever this is what he does every single day that's again a great reason to get out there and train it's kind of like a superpower uh yes it's 100 jiu jitsu is 100 a superpower there's no doubt about it i mean it's

100 you know what that's one of my kids asked me when it was my son he asked me when he was a little kid the movie the incredibles came out and he said hey dad is there really such a thing as superpower and i said hmm yes there is it's a little thing that you do every day it's called jiu jitsu and and eventually he realized that oh i i can actually fight anybody and it's going to be fine and that's a very beneficial thing to have because there's always i guess i'm a little bit

biased because of the way kind of the how i grew up there's always violence there's always some sort of inferred level of violence i mean a seal platoon there's a pecking order you know and it has to do with with fighting and and that's the same with any group of of of knuckle dragger neanderthal men that are in a group there's always a guy that's that yeah that guy's kind of he's the one that can kind of beat everyone up that's the way it is so i'm sorry that it's that way i'm sorry it's not

a cerebral contest but there's only two forms of communication one of them is words and the other one is violence and when the first one fails that's when the second one comes about and i i absolutely think dude i've stood on the front door of a thousand club nights right i've met about a million people stood on the front door of nightclubs i have seen literally hundreds of fights occur when people have had a bit to drink and i spoke to a an anthropologist um and he was drawing parallels between the ways that particularly guys

um when they first start to fight especially if their inhibitions are lowered a little bit uh and he was drawing a parallels between that and the way that other animals fight as well so he said one of the first things that you'll see men do is that they'll start to circle each other he said what did dear do you know when they've got the they've got their antlers and they'll circle what they're doing they're kind of they're sizing each other up and they'll circle and they'll circle and they'll circle and then they'll come in and

they'll push first maybe and what's that doing oh it's getting kind of a feel for what's going on it's getting a sense of just how big is it do i really really want to go do i want to go do it right i'll give it a and then maybe come back and do it again and then circle a little bit more and circle a little bit more i thought it was so fascinating do i really want to go do they really want to go too like maybe i can just get away with a push and

they'll realize that yeah there's some definite comparisons there there's i'm sorry to inform everybody but we're animals and that stuff some of us yeah some of us more than others i just thought that were you talking about women doing brazilian jiu jitsu is there some is there a particularly unique challenge i mean women are very hardwired to avoid being grabbed and and laid on by a man that's much larger than them even if it is in a controlled situation right even if it isn't in a class or whatever there's some particularly unique challenges that the

girls have when they begin to do brazilian jiu jitsu or have you have you found that there are hurdles that girls have to get over just generally is there something like innate in their programming that kind of causes them to to react in a in a different way yeah um i would say it's not normal for a girl or a woman to want some dude all up on them and that's what jiu jitsu is you are all up on each other and you know it's it's a very for lack of a better word it's very

intimate con contact that you're having with another human being so there's it is a hurdle it's absolutely a hurdle for for women and girls to get over and once i get over it it's like okay cool and then it's much better to get over it on the mats in a jujitsu academy than it is to have to contend with that psychological hurdle when you're in a problematic scenario and you're being attacked that is not the time to try and figure out what matters and what doesn't matter and what this feels like and what that feels

like and yeah you want to train and you want to overcome that hurdle in a nice safe environment thinking about the bullying topic i was considering about what that causes in later life so i had a bit of a tough sort of school upbringing with bullying and stuff like that and i was thinking about it reflecting on it a lot and i realized that a lot of the things that that created downstream in later life are the things that i most value in myself and this has been a very difficult thing for me to to

kind of pass to just work out like i'm gonna invite do i need to thank the bullies in a way have they created some of the things in myself that i most value so for instance um moved out to america to come and do the podcast that has only been afforded to me really because i don't care about being solitary i don't care about being on my own i don't care about taking risks because for a very long time i was in any case on my own and everything was a risk going to school was

a risk or going out for lunch was a risk or whatever and then thinking about how thinking about how i uh noticed certain things right i went to a party not long ago and was obsessed about the fact for about the first five minutes obsessed about uh half of the people had taken their shoes and socks off but half of the people had only taken their shoes off and left their socks on but the reason that i was paying so much attention is because in school i would obsess over um the way that certain kids

had their hair cut or the way that they would carry their bag or the way that they would do their tie because i was sure that that was the reason that they had friends and i didn't i was trying to deconstruct in other people socially what was going on with them that meant that they and obviously i didn't realize it's that they were sociable probably and were communicating well and whatever you know a classic only child with like sprinkling of autism or whatever so like um but i really value that i value the fact i

i paid that much attention and it got me thinking more and more about a lot of the things that we really value in ourselves as adults are the light side of something that we probably are a little bit embarrassed about and i was wondering whether first off whether you see that dynamic in yourself whether there are there are things that you most value that that have um costs that you need to pay and then also whether perfect childhoods create weak adults so going back to the conversation i had with sam harris um he kind of

called me out on the fact that i had said something along the lines is of combat was sort of when i most felt alive and i wouldn't trade it for anything and i also would say the worst days of my life were in war losing my friends and war is horrible and the way i responded to it and i asked him if he had anyone had ever known anyone that had cancer and had come out the other side and he said yes and i said oftentimes those people say i wouldn't wish it on anybody but

i'm glad it happened to me because it gave me such a better perspective about life and about value and about the fragility of life and all those things and that's the way i feel about combat i don't wish it on anybody but i would wouldn't give it up i wouldn't trade it for anything and so i think what you're talking about is a great way of looking at your past to say oh okay um i had some hardships and i benefited from those it's basically the same thing as saying got bullied good now i know

how to handle myself a little bit better i didn't have a bunch of friends good now i feel more comfortable when i'm alone i think it's the same sort of attitude in in both those situations and then as far as as far as how people are raised and what you get it's it's an interesting thing and probably the only thing i can talk with any level of understanding of and it's actually a lack of understanding is basic seal training because basic seal training you would think well you know this person comes from a hard background

they didn't have much growing up they're hungry and now they have this opportunity and they're never gonna quit or you say oh you know this person went to a nice private school and they grew up with a silver spoon in their mouth and when they get to this harsh environment they're probably gonna quit and the fact is that's not true in either one of those cases some kids that grew up in very tough environments you know working 18 hours a day on a dairy farm they show up to buds and quit and and some kids

that grew up you know working 18 hours a day on a dairy farm they'll never quit and some kids that grow up with a silver spoon in their mouth they show up and quit and some kids that show up with a silver spoon in their mouth they never quit so i think there's some inherent characteristic of a person that your environment plays a role but it can be overcome by determination and i think you probably have a lot more control over what you do in your life than your background does that is the i think

the genesis of why i love agency so much why i love the ability to live your life by design not by default the fact that you get to forge whatever the path is that you want to go forward like that to me is especially as someone that like i say maybe grew up felt feeling a little bit helpless uh the fact that you realize hang on if i if i put this amount of work in and i dedicate myself and i'm committed and so on and so forth the fact that you can come out the

other side of that and realize that it has real world returns to you is it's phenomenal it's it's one of the most rewarding most empowering i hate that word but you know what i mean like it's kind of it's one it's just been ruined like empowering empowerment has been ruined as a word but it's actually really useful and i can't use anything else but it's it's good it's a it's a great feeling yeah that kind of recognition is what allows people to move on in life and take control of their life and make things happen

and you know going back to your earlier thing about you know if you're in a relationship with someone it's not working saying you know what this isn't working and i'm going to move on that's a good thing you have to take ownership and that doesn't mean ownership meaning i'm always at fault and therefore i'm gonna sit here and do nothing it's like oh i'm at fault for even being in this relationship with this person i'm gonna move on no factor i've heard you say that you wouldn't be doing anything that you're doing now if it

wasn't for surfing how so well surfing i started surfing when i was 10 years old i was very lucky that a guy decided to teach me how to surf a lifeguard said hey i'm going to teach you how to surf and he did and yeah that's a huge that completely directed my life because when you're looking at all the special operations unit units to go into you know there's rangers there's special forces there's marine corps special operations there's all these different things that you can go and do and one of them is primarily focused on

the water and one of them you can get stationed either in san diego california or virginia beach virginia and it was just such a no-brainer for me so are you saying that part of your military career was dictated by where the good surf was 100 100 and making it through training if i wouldn't have surfed i may not have made it through training because your comfort level in the water is so high from surfing and you know i grew up surfing in new england and it's freezing cold and so the cold water to me was

a joke and the water problems were relatively easy for me compared to someone that didn't spend a bunch of time in the water so surfing is a is a great thing to have in your background if you're gonna go try and be a seal or you know if you played water polo if you're on the swim team something that makes you super comfortable in the water is going to be highly beneficial and that's probably the biggest separator in people that make it in fact it is people that make it and don't make it if you're

comfortable in the water you have a much better chance of making it if you're let me rephrase that if you're not comfortable in the water your chance of making it through seal training is very small so people that were swimmers in high school or whatever massive massive advantage massive advantage surfing massive advantage water polo massive advantage yep i heard someone say the other day that if they could if they could give their kids three sports to do throughout their uh their childhood one would be a martial art that's effective one would be gymnastics to learn

their body in space and one would be some sort of swimming water-based event to learn their body in water i thought those are those are solid picks right there seems seems like you're going to create a bit of a beast of a kid there yeah yeah it's um the whole water i mean you see this look at any event look at crossfit games or something right and there's always one guy because there's usually a swim run bike or a paddleboard run something else event in there there's always one guy that swam in college and you

go okay so these people train six hours a day five or six days a week for forever and they're the elite of the elite when it comes to fitness and homeboy is he's half the time of the rest of the field it can't be just due to fitness it's got to be due to something there's people with more capacity he'll come 15th in a field of 40 over the overall but on that event you really do see the the experience that that someone that knows how to swim has it's like worlds apart technique it's it's

technique just like anything else just like jiu-jitsu technique will win rock climbing technique will win it's interesting that people think you'd be able to fight without training but you why wouldn't you be able to play guitar without training it's the same exact thing but no but when i get really angry my guitar yeah your guitar comes out yeah exactly that's that's what people think same thing with leadership people think oh well you can't really learn leadership it's like no leadership is a skill just like guitar is a skill there's moves that are just like playing

chords and people don't understand that and and that's you know one of the reasons i am able to that's why i have a company teaching leadership because it's like oh you mean you're not just born with this you mean you're not just born knowing how to swim you're not just born knowing how to play guitar and you're not just born knowing how to lead you have to learn how to do it and you can learn how to do it oh you can absolutely learn as opposed to a fixed mindset of this is me this is

where i'm at i i don't know guitar now therefore i'm never going to know guitar right i'm not a leader now i don't have creativity you know first thing that we we spoke about can you explain to me i've always wanted someone that knows uh surfing to explain this to me let's say that you're surfing a big swell and you go under can you explain how you get out from underneath a large wave when you're below the water i've heard about you swim out sideways and there's like a particular well so in what you're talking

about sideways i'm assuming what you're talking about is certain breaks have a channel meaning the waves break in one area but there's deeper water on either side of the break and therefore the waves don't break there and you can see this in any any of the big famous surf spots or many most of the big famous surf spots you can look and you can see there's a boat sitting here taking pictures of people that are surfing the waves that boat is sitting in deep water and the wave is breaking in shallow water so generally if

you get if you fall or you're trying to paddle back out you go into the deep water and you paddle out and there's no waves breaking there yeah i thought it was i thought it was something to do with the fact that if you were down uh if you were taken under the water relatively deep below where the waves were um that trying to swim either toward land or back is a bad idea i'm going to guess that oh so what you're talking about is a is a is a rip current so a rip current

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

so what you do is you swim parallel to the beach and then you'll drift out a little further as you swim parallel but eventually you'll swim out of the rip current then you can swim into the beach that's what i meant yep there you go there's two ways that life seems to be short to me so one is in the fact that days go by pretty quickly and we seem to get old uh a lot sooner perhaps than we expect and the other is that tomorrow is not necessarily promised to us and that things can

end pretty quickly how do you think people can remind themselves of this shortness of life we're very distracted at the moment there is always something that can take us away from the present moment and there are things that we're moving toward that are in the future how can people remind themselves of the urgency that life has to it i mean you know for me it's real easy because i i know that a lot of a lot of my friends that are not here and that's all i need to that's all i need to know and

i mean i think about that every day so there's no for me personally there's no there's no lack of urgency when i wake up in the morning to think oh don't worry i got all the time in the world because i know i don't and i'm lucky to be here and i'm going to try and live in a way that will at least do justice for my friends that aren't here tim kennedy said that he'd looked back at a photo of maybe the graduating class that he was in or certainly some uh unit that he

was a part of and he looked at it and he realized that he was the only person that was left from that photo the only one and you know it's one of those things it's kind of like the the um i got cancer and i i i sort of didn't want it but i'm glad that it happened to me because on the other side of it it kind of feels a little bit like the same energy as that that you go well do i want to lose all of my friends no absolutely not have i

been able to like alchemy have i been able to take something from that like the bullying thing in later life right have i been able to turn that transmute that into something that i really value uh and i suppose that that's one of the ways as well it is about as good of a forget eulogies forget the service forget the nice words it's okay because of what this person did for me while they were alive now that they've passed look at how much more i'm living look at i mean is there any better tribute to

somebody definitely makes you appreciate the sunsets more we were watching it last night it's very very nice over here another thing i've been thinking about with the shortness of life is the same 34 and it's only been within the last maybe two years or so two to three years where age has started to actually feel like a thing now obviously it was a it was a new age was a thing and but for most of your 20s what you're doing is you're becoming stronger faster smarter everything continues to get better and then there's a point

kind of like at the top of a roller coaster where the inertia comes in and you feel everything be a bit weightless and he's such a relatable recovery from workouts is taking just a little bit longer than it used to and injuries are taking a little bit more to get past and i mean the hangover thing has been happening since i was like 24 like that just linearly got worse since i was 24. um but there is a point at which you become kind of aware of your own mortality uh not in a my friends

have died way but in a entropy way do you have any advice to men that are getting older and becoming chronically aware of that yeah lift weights do jiu jitsu go for run stretch out eat good stop drinking it's pretty straightforward if you don't uh if you don't use it you're gonna lose it every day that you don't do work you're going backwards and it and it definitely will hurt you and it'll show up you can't get away with what you got away with when you were 23 you it doesn't work you you have to

you have to stay ahead of it i had uh nate zinser dr nate zinser uh he's a one of the special forces he was there uh the mindset coach the psychology coach and uh he was telling me i was asking him what um what age is it that you can finish applying for the seal is it 28 25 it's it's 28 i think it's 28 or 29. and i asked what what's the reason for there being an upper bound i mean there's guys in their 30s that are super fit the guys in the ufc in

the 40s that are super fit and he said well it's about what the body can tolerate especially during selection he was telling me the story about um one of the climbing uh rope climbing sections 30 feet high over sand and some 20 21 year old kid fell from the top flat on his stomach and apparently just bounced off the floor and got up and started running he thought actually yeah if if he was 38 that's a that's a very different reaction after you've dropped for 30 feet onto sand yeah the training is gonna it's gonna

destroy it destroys kids and so if you're not ready to recover very quickly it's going to be a problem and i think you know are there people that could pull it off sure there are and there are there are guys that get waivers that are 32 years old and they're super studs and they make it but if you did if you ran the numbers which i'm sure the navy ran the numbers and is like oh the i mean quite frankly i just learned this figure the other day people that are younger than 20 have like

a five percent chance of making it through of making through basic seal training okay because they just don't have the the maturity and they might not be strong enough yet and i mean i would say the optimum age is probably like 23 24 you're stronger [Music] but i mean i was like i went through when i was young i was 19 years old and you know you were pretty light as slight compared with now right when you went through i started i was 174 when i went through what are you six one six two five

eleven hey okay yep and 185 when i graduated so i gained like 11 pounds going through sale training and then yeah and and which is you know when you're young i mean my body is just you know seeping testosterone you know 19 years old you're working out all day long with chicken nuggets yeah chicken nuggets getting after it just all the food you can possibly eat it's it's awesome [Music] but it's an abusive training program it's hard on the body it it trashes guys for sure i've been hearing uh goggins stories about his three times

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

is not fair at all it's not fair at all and there's i'm sure there's good guys that don't make it because they just physically can't handle it that being said the way the program works for the most part if you don't make it it's because you didn't make it like they have guys way more people that ring the bell than have blown out knees it's it's 80 it's probably 85 90 that ring out 10 that get some injury that is incurable uh because they'll let you heal up they let guys stay there for a while

to heal up um but yeah it's an abusive program say that with a smile on your face are there any other um special forces selections that you're aware of that are uh comparable in terms of the difficulty they're all they're all hard they all have their own tests and they are all screening out a bunch of people and i've only been through one and they're all they're all different ways of beating you up i mean you know for instance ranger school you don't eat a lot so people lose 20 pounds during ranger school that's preparing

them for being wilderness isolation in the field yep um special forces has its own things to push you so everyone's got their own little techniques of getting rid of guys sas is a lot of orienteering it's a lot of breaking beacons it's up and down hills heavy bergen packs yep on your own no you don't know how much time you've got they just say do your best you oh you're trying to let us catch you you didn't make the time you're out which i mean you didn't know what the time was but you didn't know

what the time was but it wasn't fast enough in seal training you you're not allowed to wear a watch so how how fast you have to run as fast as you can at least for me i had to run this fast training you're not allowed to wear a watch not a load of wear watch you know how long anything is gonna take you don't know how long you've been swimming for your only choice is to go hard that's that's good right we just want you to go as hard as you can i did a reality

tv show about seven years ago and um on that they removed all of our watches before we went in and all of the clocks of the guys that came in to change the batteries on our microphones they changed them all so they didn't tell the right time the watches of the drivers the cars that we got in and we never found out why that was the case i thought i think it was because uh they didn't want us to know when we were going to bed and waking up because everyone was excitable and 18 or

whatever how long were you in the field for i was in the show for about a month uh but i mean i'm what were the what kind of tasks were the timed tasks that you were that you were executing so uh unfortunately this isn't as reputable as doing a reality tv show about um armed forces this is a dating show and dating like dating like a bachelor like a male female yes scenario yes jack uh i'm not equating the two between doing buds and going on love island um but my point is that um i

think what they were trying to do was just uh take the power from the people that were um the subjects to the people that were in control and disorient the the people that were there now there were actually it wasn't like a a challenge thing where people were having limited food or doing challenges to stay in and stuff like that it was exclusively about romance but what they'd found was that there was something there must have been something that they thought that was effective by doing that and um thankfully i just didn't have to i

didn't have to swim as much as as you guys did so i came out the other side of that feeling all right i'm glad you made it i i did well i mean like i'm here today it was it was difficult um i spoke to michael punky higgs you know him seal commander chief master chief i spoke to him and he's doing some stuff with psychedelics at the moment um which i i found absolutely fascinating and he very carefully walked me through the um reason that he he felt he needed i mean he'd had a

gun to his head i think two or three times separately uh he was really really struggling and um he's doing i think he's in mexico as his his place where he's doing psychedelic therapy for veterans what's your what's your thoughts on on that uh punky's awesome awesome guy um i'm glad you said michael punky higgs because otherwise i just said mike it would have taken me a minute but yeah punky's an awesome guy uh i i've never tried that stuff and i i've i've definitely talked to a lot of guys that it's helped out and

if something's gonna help guys out i think it's good to go for people to go try it but i haven't tried it myself and i don't i don't know i don't know too much about it um i've had some friends that have done it uh my friend dakota meyer had him on the podcast and he talked about his experiences i've talked to tim ferriss a decent amount about it because he's huge into it at the moment right he is investing yeah and and before i had dakota on and i knew dakota and i were gonna

talk about it i actually called tim and like took notes so that i had a better understanding because i don't know i don't know i don't know enough about it to be able to comment on it for me it's just being on the outside trying to trying to explain or at least share i guess share the story of people that have utilized them and it's been helpful for so i don't know a lot about it was it um was it dakota that was talking might have been on rogan about it's a type of patch some

sort of patch or a single time thing that they maybe do on the neck yeah that's another thing that's a that's a uh stella ganglion block i believe it's called yep and that's another thing that people use sounds absolutely wild it's a single time thing you do have to get it you know periodically you know every six months every year i forgot the date is but yes that's another thing that's been very effective for some people so again i'm i'm i'm not in any position to talk about this stuff with any uh with any knowledge

whatsoever other than hey i've i've had some friends that have done it and they've said it's been useful it's been helpful seals were very publicity shy for a long time and that trend of the the quiet professional was uh pretty strong do you ever regret being so recognizable or well known i mean i spent my whole life just kind of being very you know unrecognizable and and there's some there's some very nice things about that and you know uh when i now that i'm now that i'm more recognizable you know some of those advantages of

being unrecognizable are gone but for me the being able to help people out has been worth the the pain and i use that term very loosely worth the the small inconveniences of you know being recognized by by people and most people that recognize me are cool people that say hey man listen your podcast thanks and i say hey man no problem you know appreciate it so it's you know i'm not in some weird scenario i don't have you know most people that listen to the podcast are pretty cool people and that you'd probably want to

meet yeah that i that i would want to meet and hang out with and they usually have something positive to say or some insight that they can give me something that i missed something that they could clarify for me so it's all good it's no factor really i walked down broadway in nashville with jordan peterson on a friday night last year and that was uh that was a sight to behold that was like i mean he managed to accumulate a queue of people um to see as he walked down the street he was who's what's

that is that jordan peterson oh and then he ended up buying a stetson hat and doing like the michael jackson thing like the walk yeah uh in an attempt to like get through the crowd um but yeah i just i thought it was interesting because you you'd spent all of this time and and again you had this culture in the seals of the the quite professional and stuff and i was interested in the price that you know it's kind of like being in service again in a weird way right yeah i mean you know compared

with going to war people coming up to you in the street or wanting to take a selfie and stuff like you know not even in the same universe but my point being that there is still there's things that you have to put up with or do in order to get the message out there and your sense is that it's worth it yeah it's it's it's fine i mean again the amount of feedback that i get from people that are that have benefited greatly is well worth you know any small inconveniences that i might have in

my life it's no factor what do you think it was about your task unit that ended up it caused it to contain so many particularly elite operators i mean it seems to me like there's been a lot i mean you know yourself life uh chris kyle uh it was latrell in there as well no he was not but my point being like it's that's like a fairly illustrious list yeah i mean and i i don't i'm struggling to see to remember what word you just used to describe the level of operators but i mean we

were kind of normal kind of a normal task unit nothing spectacular we had a we we got put into a combat environment that was a target rich environment and went hard in in that deployment and you know that's that's kind of how it turned out you know a seal team a seal platoon you're gonna get it's it's a bell curve like any other group and there's some awesome guys in every seal platoon there's a bunch of really good guys in the seal platoon and there's a couple you know just not so awesome guys in a

sealed platoon but they're gonna they're gonna do their job too sometimes and you know there's that's the way it is and you know we we that deployment had a lot of visibility uh on it because it was because there was a very kinetic deployment and [Music] um you know we also you know just from a from a historical standpoint you know mark lee was in was it was with us and he was the first seal killed in iraq and mikey monsoor was with us and mikey you know was was awarded the medal of honor posthumously

and and so those kind of things sort of definitely drew the spotlight to what had happened and and that deployment what was chris kyle like in real life just a awesome funny guy that was a good patient sniper and cared about his job and cared about his family and was a you know was was a good damn good sniper that would stay on his gun for a very long time and you know he was also very funny very gregarious always doing pranks just just a good a a good guy like like we're talking about earlier

kind of guy you want to go to war with how did it feel watching that movie you know it's it's it's a hollywood movie and i i i kind of went into it with rudimentary understanding that this movie's not going to be some documentary depiction of everything that happened yeah they have to take a guy and take his whole life and take multiple deployments and condense that all down in a very short time period they got to take a a very complex combat situation and bear and and distill that down into like good guy bad

guy and and and that's what they did and and i you know um also trying to show the the sacrifices that the families make and how hard it is on the families that's was probably the most important part of the story and so it was you know i watched it and and kind of as i watched it i kind of understood those things and you know like that was that to me the conversation around the family of servicemen and service women families is is definitely one that 15 years ago i don't remember thinking about as

much and now is one of the things that's at the front of my mind that when you have somebody that goes on operation and serves it's not just them that pay the price and it's not just them and the support units that are out there and the drivers and the people on the ground and the fixers and the translators and stuff there's a literal army of people back home as well that have to pay sometimes just as high of a price yeah in some cases higher um you know when you when i'm on deployment i

know what's happening i know what is going on i know what the risks are i know what i can do to mitigate those risks my my wife my kids were too young to understand but my wife she knows what the risks are she and well let me rephrase that she doesn't know what the risks are she doesn't know how we're mitigating risks she doesn't know what it's like on the ground so it's very easy for someone in the family to start you know believing the worst things that are happening and every you know when you

see that there's a casualty and al there's two marines killed in the lombard province or there's four marines killed in al-anbar province and you know that the vast majority of those casualties are taking place in the city of ramadi which is where your husband is that can create some that can create some that can create some drama in your head and that can make that deployment worse for the family at home than it is for the the guy that's on deployment think about whenever you've got a missing kid and what is it that the pair

are missing anybody right when the family of that person are doing the press tour trying to appeal the thing that they all say even if it's been five years i just want to know because the open loop of being uncertain about something is literal torture and yeah i can imagine that by not knowing it's not like you're whatsapp messaging every couple of hours yeah good just got to ramadi bit hot here uh his selfie like that's not that's not the way that it works nope nope so they don't know what's going on and fear of

the unknown is a thing and so for the families back home it can be very very difficult for sure would you ever run for office does that call to you by the way i i certainly hope not [Laughter] yeah i don't i don't i don't want to get involved in politics and [Music] you know i don't think it's just a disgusting sort of life and you know my five friends that are involved in politics and it just doesn't seem like that uh doesn't seem like what i'd want to do um in my life what about

running a school obviously you've got the stuff that you already do with kids you have that that foot in the door tim has got his thing in austin yep does that call to you yeah and i've i've got people that are you know again tim and i talked about this and tim's doing an awesome thing with his school apogee cedar park so and look at it it's outstanding so with the warrior kid thing i've got some uh some irons in the fire on that right now yep what would you add into or what would be

the uh are there any big differences that you think would be made in a school syllabus typical to what you're aware of at the moment if if you were to be the person that was oh yeah in charge yeah 100 of course changes to this civilian school yeah syllabus oh yeah like absolutely what would you change uh basic survival skills right how to start a fire how to put out a fire basic basic trauma medicine how you do first aid just those kind of things how you change the tire on a car basic plumbing basic

electrical like some life skills that are very beneficial working on engines those kind of things and yeah those those are things i would add to the curriculum obviously jiu jitsu would be in the correct i was going to say if you were to do that i would be so interested if everybody was if pe i don't know what you call it out here yeah we can't pee uh if pe was um heavily pushed toward learning combat and learning martial arts i would be fascinated to know what happens to bullying rights in schools yeah everybody knows

that everybody can go yeah well there's also there's a natural packing order that gets established and it is what it is the thing is i've said this jiu jitsu will not only help you from get getting bullied it will also prevent you from becoming a bill bully because when a kid's doing jiu jitsu they realize oh i'm a little bit bigger and stronger i can take this person but there's someone that's bigger and stronger than me and they can take me and so it it helps on both both fronts what about um working on movies

obviously we've had cowboy cerrone gina carano they're people that have moved across into the movie industry would you be interested in that as a writer or maybe even as a as a person in front of the lens yeah i mean i've i've got some some forward motion on both warrior kid right now and on the novel that i wrote called final spin so the both of those are being are moving forward in the in the movie arena that's pretty cool yeah and those it's take warrior kid it's taken a while to find the right people

but that's that's moving forward and saint final spin took less i mean final spin only just came out and it was almost immediately was getting requests for a movie adaptation warrior kid was the same thing but it took a while to find the right people and it's a project that i didn't want to kind of just haphazardly throw out there to the world so yeah both those are moving forward in the and and they're going to come how does that feel as someone who didn't grow up with no desire to be a writer throughout seals

throughout brazilian jiu jitsu and surfing and stuff like that and then you just appear with a fiction novel and now it's being turned into a film how does that feel what does that mean to you i mean i have so many stories in my head that's kind of crazy that's the one that bubbled to the surface and there's a bunch more that come up on a daily basis that it's just a matter of which ones i'm gonna take the time to put onto paper and you know i i don't know i i i don't think

about that kind of stuff too much um i'm stoked you know it's very cool um and it's it's cool i like it it's it's it's gonna be cool to watch this thing get made and i'm stoked about it that is a byproduct the fact that you don't overthink um you don't think too much about the situation itself i think is a byproduct of someone that has a lot of forward momentum i think that when you've just got lots of things that are happening um you by necessity you just focus on whatever's next in front of

you yeah earlier you were talking about thinking about whether you're gonna be successful or not and oddly enough i don't really i don't really think about that i don't think about how's this book going to do how's this is it going to get turned into a movie i don't think about that i just kind of go and like so i guess yes i agree with you you're the forward momentum piece i'm kind of moving forward and people that work with me they know that i'm like on to the next thing all right hey cool that

thing's that thing's got some trajectory it's going in the right direction cool i'm gonna go on to the next thing and and keep moving forward i spoke to huben a couple of weeks ago and i brought up with him about the fact that um he's got tattoos that very few people have have seen although there are photos on the internet there's one of him in an uh octopus t-shirt looking like this um have you got any tattoos right thinking that you've got one what what is it what does it mean i i got a tattoo

when i was a kid like you know i was in the hardcore scene and and you know we all were getting tattoos and and so yeah i got a tattoo it's like just a kind of a random design on my back uh no real it's kind of half finished and it's kind of dumb but would you ever finish it off or you just i don't care not bothered that well i guess it is literally behind you yeah yeah it's literally behind me and i think one of my daughters said they usually get that thing finished

i'm like yeah i'm not gonna miss i'm not gonna miss three days of jiu-jitsu to let a tattoo heal up so that is it's not happening so i know that you're a fan of the uh thomas soul quote where he says there's no solutions only trade-offs and this is something in a roundabout way that same concept is probably one of the most meaningful things i've learned this year what does that quote mean to you or how have you how have you reflected on that well especially from a leadership perspective that's kind of where i talked

about it for the first time how the heck did you hear that quote from me that's i don't know when i've said that i guess i could do some podcasts about it but yeah it's a it's it's very helpful to people's mindsets i think and that's when i when i talked about that it was primarily to help people see that you're looking for a full-on solution to this problem and there's probably not a full-on solution that's going to satisfy every every aspect of this scenario so what you have to do instead is you have to

look for what what's the trade-off going to be i'm going to win a little bit here i'm going to lose a little bit there but overall it's going to move me in the right direction i think it's a good thing to understand as opposed to going through life thinking that you're going to find a 100 solution because it's not going to exist so you're going to have to make trade-offs in life douglas murray came on the show and he was talking about this story from christopher hitchens where hitch told him that in life we have

to choose our regrets and what he meant by that was the fact that opportunity cost demands that you're going to have regrets and i'd always thought that regrets were a bug not a feature of life i didn't realize that they were baked into the literal fabric of how we exist so you could make the perfect decision and still look back and have regrets about not making the other ones simply because of that open loop that we were talking about before yeah you don't know what the other thing could have been i said okay so well

that's interesting that regrets are a feature not a bug what does it mean that you need to choose them okay well given the fact that regrets are baked into the fabric of life when you're making a decision one of the things that you need to consider is which of these regrets can i live with and which of these regrets can i not live with and that there's no solutions only trade-offs thing speaks to the same energy 100 percent do you own a house yes so when you're the a real estate agent told me this years

and years ago when you're looking at a house there's gonna be shortfalls there's gonna be problems with the house that you're looking at and whether it's gonna be even if it's the perfect house well that means it's gonna cost a ton so that's the trade-off that you're gonna make and so what you have to do is you have to break down like what you just said hey listen i wanted a bigger yard but this one has a huge garage i'm going to go with it you just got to figure out those trade-offs there's no solutions

you're not going to get the perfect house until you build one and even when we build one guess what you're going to look at it when you're done and you're going to say i should have moved this wall 24 inches to the west right it's it'll it'll each up talk to me about your uh approach with long-term plans because i've heard you mentioned that uh real long-term plans are something that you don't necessarily optimize for you seem to optimize a little bit more for optionality and for kind of a medium-term thing what's your thinking around

that yeah i don't know what i'm gonna be doing in five years people what are you what's your five year plan i have no idea what my five year plan is because i don't know what opportunities are going to arise i don't know what things i'm gonna fail at i don't know what mistakes i'm gonna make so where how am i gonna sit here and tell you where i'm gonna be in five years i i can't and if i did i'd probably be shutting off some opportunities that are there because i'm too close-minded and focused

on some five-year plan so i make iterative decisions about things i move a little bit in some direction i test i get the feedback from it was it good was it bad should i put more resources toward it or not and then as time goes by i've either moved significantly in that direction or i've realized it's a dead end and i'm going to move away it was it was more convenient a year ago when i'd say five years ago i didn't have a podcast i didn't have a book i didn't have any that wasn't didn't

have anything really that was five years ago so my five year plan if you would six years ago my five year plan would have been like oh i guess i'll be training jiu jitsu and i would be training jiu jitsu and surfing and hanging out with my family working with life probably doing national um front but maybe a slightly bit bigger maybe not even yeah i mean i don't know yeah we we we didn't jump in and invest some huge amount of money into ashland front no we started hey does anyone want to learn this

stuff oh yeah it looks like they do oh yeah it looks like a lot of people do oh looks like it's very beneficial to them oh they're telling all their friends at other companies that they should do this stuff so they can get better and that whole way down the path yes we'll spend more time we'll invest more into it we'll write a book about it cool that made sense so that's what that's what i have to take the the approach with everything what opportunities are going to knock on my door today what opportunities have

i started that are going to close tomorrow i don't know so i don't spend i don't invest a lot of time and energy trying to predict where i'm going to be in five years when i don't know [Laughter] [Music] i i really resonated with that i really like it because especially in the online productivity world you know you should break down the 25-year plan into five-year blocks into one-year sprints into quarterly goals or whatever and it's just never resonated with me it's never resonate it doesn't appeal to my nature it doesn't appeal to the way

that life is by design unpredictable and you don't know what skills you're going to acquire what setbacks or advantages are going to come your way and that was you it was you're one of the first people i've heard who's really succinctly putting together is look i don't have and you're someone that if people would think jocko's the kind of guy with the plan right you don't go into battle without a plan yeah well yeah but the entire war is something that requires us to respond as it occurs yeah look at the mistakes we've made well

america has made as a country in war why because we had a long-term strategy that didn't make sense and guess what no one was willing to say hey this long-term strategy we've got is not working we need to make some adjustments and we need to do it now instead nope ignore those numbers ignore the the feedback loop that we're getting just press forward with this strategy that we're on doesn't it doesn't work so i don't want to have you have to go into battle with an idea of where you want to get to and then

you as you start moving in that direction you've got to say oh that wasn't what i thought it was going to be we need to make some adjustments that's the discipline and creativity spectrum coming up again it is indeed looking from the outside as somebody that's black belt in brazilian jiu jitsu the stuff that you're doing with origin bringing manufacturing back to the us writing books books being turned into screenplays and movies and stuff like that and everything else that you do that from the outside can look like something which is uh incredibly desirable as

a position to get in one thing that i've learned over the last few years especially since spending more time around the people that are successful and have accolades and stuff is that often there's prices that they pay for getting to this stage that they're at that the people who want to be there wouldn't end up paying so um what i've come to believe is that a lot of the time people have very very uh high bars and challenges that they need to get past i'm interested in what the price is that you have to pay

in order to sort of be jocker wellington on a daily basis work work a lot of work you know when uh when you're watching tv or you're [Music] you know looking at instagram or you're you know going out for dinner on a date and you go to a movie i'm not doing that i'm reading a book i'm getting ready for a podcast i'm writing something i'm preparing for something um talking to a client i'm designing something i'm thinking about a new supplement like it's just just it's it's it's just kind of all the time and

so this is a guy asked me the other day are you working more now than you were when you were in the seal teams and the answer is 100 yes i'm working harder now you know i'm well i should say i'm working more because i'm working more more time no weekends um no weekends no evenings really luckily for me i like what i do i was going to say so would you even want that you know would you want to spend an afternoon on the couch watching netflix is that something after a very long time

of driving discipline is that a desire that you have any longer to sit on the couch and watch netflix yeah i mean not that's not that's not super i'm not super stoked on that yeah that's my point uh yeah you've managed to align what you want and what you want to want they're not sitting on top of each other right yeah and i i also don't do a lot of what i don't want to do and my partner echelon front life babin pointed this out to me like a year ago he just said he said

you know you've oh you're really good he was doing some stuff that he didn't want to be doing and you know whether it was administrative stuff and you know he said you know i've got to do this and i've got to do so why are you doing that and he said well what do you mean i said get someone else to do that and then you know a week later he's talking he goes you know i was thinking about what you said you're really good at not doing what you don't want to do and i

am good at doing i'm i am good at not doing what i don't want to do i mean administrative stuff stuff like that i don't do any of it i don't do any of it do i have an accountant does an accountant cost me a lot of money yes they do do i worry about it nope not in a single bit not in the slightest way don't worry about it at all and i don't have to deal with it and my taxes are getting done you know that's a lot that's a crazy amount of work

and effort i don't do any of it logistics for my online store do i do i don't do any ad i don't do any of that i don't touch that stuff so all the stuff that what i get to do what i like to do the weird thing is it is a lot and and and mo it's it's going to be it's challenging for people to do it's challenging for people to do it's challenging it's challenging you know you know my wife she's like you know i said well that's not i i said you know

she'll say like what about what about this and i'm like oh i'm not gonna do that and she says you're not normal you know and i said okay fair enough she doesn't think i'm she doesn't think i'm normal and i think she's probably right i fear she may be right as well yeah so what's the principle there that that people could take away is it to try and outsource the things that you don't want to do especially let's say that it's someone that's growing a business or that is um beginning to get themselves to this

stage where they have the resources to be able to do this as quickly as possible give away the things that you don't like to do to people who can do them yeah and and there's certain things that only you can do yes do you do those things yes and let other people do things that other people can do and and and look i'm i'm also you know if you want to get straight business business tactical i tell people all the time you know you you keep things small and you let the demand signal increase and

you grow as the demand signal increases and as opposed to walk i'm not i don't jump in and say oh i don't like doing paperwork and i've got a business that i've had for three months so i'm going to hire someone as a as a cfo to run my accounting right now no i'm doing that stuff i'm doing that stuff until we have enough income to comfortably say yeah we can get someone else to do this now and i can then focus on what i'm good at so i've done that with all my businesses start

small and grow as the demand signal is there grow and you know i've done things that did didn't work and luckily i didn't invest a bunch of time and effort into them because hey i'm i'm going to be wrong a lot and so just because i think something is cool doesn't mean other people are going to think it's cool i happen to like some random thing and some people might not or a lot of people might not like it so i'm not going to overly invest in something that that people might not want at all

thinking about the stuff that you can afford to outsource and the things that you can't i think a good heuristic is what you just said there so what are the things that only you can do only you can do your podcast only i can do my podcast precisely only you can write your book books et cetera uh another one that i learned the other day from laila hormozy is a lot of the time let's say that someone's got a company a sales company selling software rit or whatever one of the first people that they'll bring

on is a salesperson and then they'll begin to do operations and she said well hang on that's the thing that brings the money in that's the thing that gives fuel to the engine which you're hoping will drive everything else so i do think that there's another element that i learned from her which is do not outsource the thing that drives the revenue the thing that drives the revenue must be protected at all costs and if that thing is you and another element that links back to what you just said there if that thing is your

motivation how can we protect the motivation well my motivation is waning to do the thing to write the book to do the podcast to give the speeches whatever because of the amount of administration okay let's lean into that even more there's that's the point of highest uh leverage for us get that blockage out of the way yeah yeah and i have all kinds of people that do all the stuff that i'm either a not good at or b don't want to do which is beautiful you know it's a beautiful thing that's decentralized command it's the

fourth law of combat leadership you know like hey how well what's going on in we have five factories right now at origin usa right where are they three in maine two in north carolina so that's an incredible amount of logistics and and i mean just leadership that's going on inside those and the technical aspect of weaving cloth and sewing and setting up lines for production that's incredible amount of work and effort and knowledge that i don't have any expertise in whatsoever guess what i have a team that does i have people that are awesome and

so that's what's going on echelon front we have scores of clients and they need help in leadership i can't teach them all guess what i have a whole team of people that has their own experiences and they're out there every single day teaching clients the the leadership lessons that we know jocko fuel the same thing you were asking me earlier like what goes into making these things oh am i giving strategic guidance about what i want a hundred percent am i taste sampling which by the way there's a good example of something that didn't work

you know the first we made an energy drink the first version of the energy drink was based on my taste buds well my taste buds since i don't drink a lot of sweets the first version that we made was not very sweet at all to me it tasted like maple syrup practically but we i had to open my mind and get feedback and people were like no actually this doesn't taste good okay well then let's change it we just changed we just changed every single flavor starting now but that took that took trial and error

of me saying wait a second i love the way this tastes but seven out of ten people think yeah it's okay three out of ten people say this doesn't taste good at all that's that's not a that's not a success you got to have 10 out of 10 people say this freaking tastes delicious and look you've got different flavors and maybe 9 out of 10 love all the flavors and there's one that oh they don't like this one but i've got to take that feedback and and adjust to what i'm hearing but that's an example

of hey we went down this road of this certain flavor and a flavor system that was based on my taste which is why i i know that i have to open my mind and take other opinions and listen to what other people have to say and now we've got tastes that are delicious and universally delicious and so now we can kind of go hard and getting it out there because before there's a risk of hey if how many times are you gonna get someone to try a drink one time if it tastes like junk they're

not getting it again so now we've got tastes that are delicious and now people yep try it now we're now we can win on taste which is awesome we're already winning on efficacy and and health but you gotta you gotta win on all fronts so now we can win on taste too what's coming up next what have you got for the rest of the year that's coming up that you're excited about or interested in probably one of the biggest things is we've got a a hunt line coming out from origin so we're making a full

line of hunting clothing hunting apparel from the base layer all the way out to the outer jacket so that's been a huge undertaking and it's very aggressive it was very aggressive what do you mean trying to get that done in a short period of time it was very aggressive and the reason we were able to do is because everything's in america the reason we're able to do is because we're able to literally making a make a design change and have it 15 minutes later for testing you can't do that when you're working with an overseas

company it's impossible it's at a minimum if you're flying it it's going to take three four days four or five days to get back it's got to get in line you don't control the line it's it's a travesty but we were able to because we're all manufactured here and the material that we're using from here so we don't even have to wait for some material to ship from overseas everything is 100 american-made so that was a huge undertaking we're starting to get to that point where i think i'm getting my first uh set of the

kit here in another week and then it'll be going into production so that's pretty cool you know we have a an online training academy so the leadership thing again you know we talked about leadership being a skill just like you can't go to the gym in one time and get in shape where you can't change jujitsu one time and now you can defend yourself or you can't pick up a guitar one time it's the same thing with leadership you can't just sit through one seminar or read one book and go okay cool i've got i

mean imagine if you picked up a book on guitar and you read it and now you thought you were gonna be able to play guitar or you read a book about basketball and now look you would get the concepts down you would understand what you're gonna be working to toward but it's a legitimate skill that you have to employ in scenarios to get better at and so in order to in order to make that happen and it was again a little bit of a blessing from covid we had created an online platform for a client

that had 157 000 employees worldwide and they wanted us to train all their employees and so i said hold on a minute because that would have basically been the dedication of the entire team at echelon front to make that happen traveling and so we had created before covet we created an online training platform and then as that as covid hit we immediately said okay looks like we're doing this stuff virtually and what was beautiful was the entire world was was made to do virtual interaction whether it was talking i i knew in easter i had

whatever easter dinner with my parents via a skype call or zoom call or whatever and i said yep this is this is the norm now everyone's to understand the capability the the benefits of being able to utilize video interaction because before that before covet it was it was rare i mean how many video calls did you do before kovid apart from the podcast he was my input from that uh up until kovid video podcasting was seen as a second-rate thing to do right don't get me wrong i would much rather sit down but especially as

a fledgling creator coming up and didn't have joe rogan money right right so i couldn't have a nice studio or fly guest out or do whatever um so for me that was how i was competing then everybody had to do yep yep you you want to keep your show going you want to keep publishing completely flattened the field right which meant that what are we competing on now oh we're competing on the quality of the conversation we're not competing on how fancy the studio is yep well that's interesting and so has that happened to you

and as it happened to every family in america that suddenly realized they were going to utilize and they understood the technology now because there's a technology barrier so now at echelon front we said okay great now we can now we can train people on a much more regular basis we can offer them so so we made extreme ownership.com which is an online training platform for leadership and for life because if you're that's not just for corporate that's also people can go do that themselves it's individuals and it's individuals this is the thing that you know

part of the thing that people people need to understand is if you're a human and you interact with other human beings you're in a leadership position it doesn't matter if you're the if you're a front-line worker and you're not in charge of any other people but guess what you're interacting with your peers you're interacting and you have to lead your boss you have to be able to lead your boss your boss doesn't know what's happening in the field your boss doesn't know what time that concrete should be poured your boss doesn't know what what time

uh those those that those forms need to be set up by it doesn't know that you have to lead your boss in that right direction you have to lead your peers in the right direction you have to lead your family in the right direction you have to even if you're you by leading your family that means putting your ego in check and listening to what your kids have to say so there's everybody's a leader and once people understand that there's so much they can get out of actually learning leadership skills so that's been that's been

pretty cool on the echelon front side so that's the origin side that's the echelon front side the jocko fuel side again we rearranged these flavors we've so that's been huge and and the rest of the supplement line is just it's just making high quality stuff and not cutting corners and we're look in the beginning when you're doing that it's hard right because you think well wouldn't it be just easier if we did this wouldn't it be couldn't we just cut this couldn't we use a little less of this this uh protein that's more expensive it's

expensive type of sweetener right whatever and so you want to make those cuts early on and we didn't and and look quite frankly when my name is on the freaking label i i can't i can't just cut corners but now people recognize that they recognize that when they buy something from jackal fuel it's as good as it's as good as you can get it's the best quality stuff that you can get so that's starting to starting to take hold and so that's been that's been great to see as well jacqueline ladies and gentlemen if people

want to keep up to date with the stuff that you're doing where should they go jocko.com chucco i appreciate you thank you thanks man appreciate it what's happening people thank you very much for tuning in if you enjoyed that episode then press here for a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last few weeks and don't forget to subscribe peace