Datasets:

MasaFoundation

/

huberman_lab_David_Goggins_How_to_Build_Immense_Inner_Strength

like 0

Follow

Masa Foundation 7

Speaker A: Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science and science based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is David Goggins. David Goggins is a retired Navy SEaL who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. He's also a highly accomplished ultra marathon runner. For those of you that don't know, ultra marathons are distances longer than 26 miles and in David's case, often longer than 200 miles. For his achievements in athletics, he has been inducted into the International Sports hall of Fame. He also held a Guinness World Record for the most pull ups completed in 24 hours. I should mention that not only was David a decorated Navy SEAL, but he also graduated from Army Ranger School. David is also a highly successful writer, having authored two books, the first entitled can't hurt me and the second entitled never finished, both of which are bestsellers. David's books cover many topics, including his autobiographical description of what can only be described as an incredibly challenging child and young adulthood. His home was abusive, his school environment was abusive, he essentially had no positive resources directed his way, and in his twenties he found himself to be obese, that is, more than 300 pounds working, a job he despised for minimal pay. And it was at that point that David began an inner dialogue that forced him to explore the demons born out of his childhood, but also the position that he found himself in as a young man, and then began the journey to navigate that dialogue and transform himself into the Navy SEAL, the ultra marathon runner, the best selling authorization, and the extraordinarily positive and influential man that he is today. As some of you may know, David has done various public lectures. He's a familiar face online because there are so many clips of him on YouTube and he has done podcasts before. However, I'm certain that you'll find today's discussion to be very different than previous podcasts that David has been featured on. The reason is that, of course, we get into his accomplishments, we talk about the mindset that allowed him to achieve those things. But today, David really lets us under the hood. He lets us into the form of inner dialogue that he has to embrace, indeed, that he has to grapple with on a daily basis, sometimes multiple times throughout the day and night, in order to impose the sort of self discipline that he is so well known for. We also get into some of the scientific mechanisms underlying willpower, and we talk about David's current endeavors that include, for instance, his own exploration of science and medicine for which he has become an intense scholar and practitioner. I should mention that multiple times throughout today's discussion, you will hear curse words. Now, David and I both acknowledge that cursing isn't for everybody and that cursing itself is different than cursing at somebody. Nonetheless, we do realize that many people, parents perhaps especially, might not want to hear cursing. If you don't want to hear cursing, well then this podcast episode is probably not for you. However, if you are comfortable with cursing, or if you can tolerate it, I assure you today's discussion is highly worthwhile. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is element. Element is an electrolyte drink with everything you need and nothing you don't. That means plenty of salt, magnesium, and potassium, the so called electrolytes, and no sugar. Now, salt, magnesium, and potassium are critical to the function of all the cells in your body, in particular to the function of your nerve cells, also called neurons. In fact, in order for your neurons to function properly, all three electrolytes need to be present in the proper ratios. And we now know that even slight reductions in electrolyte concentrations or dehydration of the body can lead to deficits in cognitive and physical performance. Element contains a science backed electrolyte ratio of 1000 milligrams. That's 1 gram of sodium, 200 milligrams of potassium, and 60 milligrams of magnesium. I typically drink element first thing in the morning when I wake up in order to hydrate my body and make sure I have enough electrolytes. And while I do any kind of physical training and after physical training as well, especially if I've been sweating a lot, if you'd like to try element, you can go to drinkelement. That's lmnt.com Huberman to claim a free element sample pack with your purchase. Again, that's drinkelement lmnt.com Huberman Today's episode is also brought to us by waking up. Waking up is a meditation app that includes hundreds of meditation programs, mindfulness trainings, yoga, Nidra sessions, and NSDR non sleep deep rest protocols. I started using the waking up app a few years ago because even though I've been doing regular meditations since my teens and I started doing yoga Nidra about a decade ago, my dad mentioned to me that he had found an app turned out to be the waking up app, which could teach you meditations of different durations, and that had a lot of different types of meditations to place the brain and body into different states, and that he liked it very much. So I gave the waking up app a try, and I, too, found it to be extremely useful because sometimes I only have a few minutes to meditate, other times I have longer to meditate. And indeed, I love the fact that I can explore different types of meditation to bring about different levels of understanding about consciousness, but also to place my brain and body into lots of different kinds of states, depending on which meditation I do. I also love that the waking up app has lots of different types of yoga Nidra sessions. For those of you who don't know, yoga Nidra is a process of lying very still but keeping an active mind. It's very different than most meditations. And there's excellent scientific data to show that yoga Nidra and something similar to it called non sleep, deep rest, or NSDR, can greatly restore levels of cognitive and physical energy, even with just a short ten minute session. If you'd like to try the waking up app, you can go to wakingup.com huberman and access a free 30 day trial. Again, that's wakingup.com huberman to access a free 30 day trial. And now for my discussion with David Goggins. David Goggins, welcome, my man.

Speaker B: Good to see you again, man.

Speaker A: Great to see you. It was late 2016, early 2017, I believe, when you were in my lab at Stanford.

Speaker B: Yes, sir.

Speaker A: We did a little work later that day down in San Jose. And gosh, see you everywhere. But it's not enough. So great to have you here.

Speaker B: Thanks for having me on, brother.

Speaker A: Yeah. You embody discipline and doing hard things, right? You just start right off with.

Speaker B: Just go there.

Speaker A: The bold truth. But right before we went hot mics, right, we were talking about learning, right? Right. Now you're spending some time learning and doing things that I think most people probably don't typically associate David Goggins with.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: Why don't you tell us about that?

Speaker B: Well, most people just look at me as the guy that runs and yells as he's running, and that's while I do that, you know, to motivate people. But people don't understand that my day is broken up into segments. I work out, I eat, I sleep, but I spend most of my time studying. So, like, I'm in the medical world. I'm a paramedic in Canada. But I spend a lot of my time trying to nuke every single thing about it because I'm not trying to just be a paramedic, learn about veins and arteries and how the heart pumps and stuff like that. I'm trying to learn to the point where I can save someone's life. And even though paramedics are doing that all over the world, I'm trying to be that paramedic that can really dissect exactly what's going on and figure out what medication goes where. Just trying to learn the algorithm of what's going on, man. So I spent a lot of time with it.

Speaker A: I love the word algorithm because when I teach biology or try and learn anything that's related to biology and especially the human body, I need to know the nouns, but it's the verbs that matter. And that's really what you're talking about. Just saying that sits there, that brain part there doesn't tell you how it all works together. So what does your process for studying look like? If we dropped a camera in the room but a microphone into your inner dialogue, gosh, wouldn't we all love that? But if we dropped a microphone into your inner dialogue, are you waking up, looking at the books and going, yeah, fresh day. Let's learn to some of the same resistance that you've talked about coming up around physical work. Is that coming up from time to time?

Speaker B: You know what? I was nervous at first. I'm gonna keep the mother. I'm gonna keep it real. I'm gonna keep it real. So I'm not a real smart guy. And what I mean by that is I was born with Add, Adhd. My brain cannot retain information. I'm not some genetic freak. When it comes to running, when it comes to lifting weights, I am absolutely the bottom of the barrel, and people will never believe me. And they can just, you know, whatever, believe what you want to believe. So when you ask me this question about what does studying look like for me, I have to go over the same page over and over and over and over again while Jennifer can look at that page while she's quizzing me, she'll learn it right then, as she doesn't know anything about it, she will quiz herself or quiz me and learn it as she's quizzing me. It's the most frustrating thing in the world, how my brain works. So what I do is I literally sit there with a pen and paper, and I have my books, and I go through and have to write everything down, every single day I will study the same page until it's photographic memory from writing the same thing down. And then from there, I'll go back through and relearn again. So I'll learn the bulk of it, but then I'll go through and learn the small things within that. So if it's a medication, I'll learn what the medication does. I'll first I'll learn how to even say the medication because these medications aren't like, you know, like albuterol. No, it's very big words. So I'll go through, learn how to say the name, then I'll go through, learn what the dose is, then I'll go through. And this is like every single day. It's not like, oh, I got it, let's just go through. No, nothing is, I got it. Every single thing. So I can't wait to get in this conversation because everything I do in life, it sucks. Everything I do in life, it sucks. That's why when I was 300 pounds and 24 years old, it wasn't like I had some big epiphany of, let's just go be a navy seal and let's lose some weight. No, I knew my entire life was going to be a struggle, which is why I just ignored it. I said, I'm not even trying to jump off into this shit and learn how to read, how to write, how to memorize, how to become something I am not. But through that process, something happened to me and I realized this is why I feel sorry for no one in this podcast. They're going to really not like me because people are going to think that I am maybe lying or maybe fibbing or exaggerating. No, I am literally, I was the lowest form on earth. No talent, no ability to learn to, and I literally know what it is to be rock bottom and to build that up. So that question about learning, it's a pain in my ass, and I don't have to do it. It's the thing about it, I'm 49 years old and I'm a multimillionaire. I don't have to do anything. So all I thought about when I was growing up is, man, I can't wait till one day get to the point where I no longer have to do this stuff. But what happened as I got older, it became a way of living. So how I do every day is how I do every day. It's a discipline, it's a regimen. It was a choice I made, and the choice I made was, what are you willing to sacrifice. And what are you willing to give up to find every bit of who you are as a human being? And I was willing to give up everything to do that. So studying is no joke.

Speaker A: I love that you're studying. I recall a few years ago, I heard some interview or podcast with you, and you just threw out. Like, I don't know what I'll do next. Maybe I'll be a scientist. And I went, yeah. I was like. Cause I knew. Cause I know you a bit, and I see your work out there. But we'd met before that if you decided that you were gonna do it, and learning medicine, which is what you're doing, learning human physiology is so detailed, and people out there have to understand. When you look at a textbook and you see the veins and the capillaries, different colors when the body's open, they're not different colors. So, I mean, some things have different color contrasts, but it's not like it's all labeled when you pop it open.

Speaker B: Exactly.

Speaker A: And so the process of writing things down by hand is important for you. So you go back and read those notes. Do you think about that stuff on your runs, too? Are you segmenting your day? Like, when you're done studying, are you heading out for a run and thinking about other things, or are you still rehearsing the material in your head?

Speaker B: So when I write it down, I write it down, and I'm able to. I'm actually looking down at this table right now because I'm back to writing. So I'm actually there right now as I'm speaking to you, I write it down in a way that I'm memorizing page 69. So I'm writing it down. So then writing it down, and that page synced together in my brain. So I'm looking at the book in my brain right now. So, like, that's just how it works for me, and I have to do it over and over again. So that page is stuck in my mind. So I'm literally flipping through pages as I'm taking these tests, and I'm taking these national tests to become a paramedic or become an advanced EMT or whatever, I'm literally, as I'm taking that test, I'm going through, and I'm like, now I'm flipping pages in my head where that page was. And how I do that is just from how I write it and how it's on the page when I run, I can't recall any of it. I cannot bring any of that, because I'm running how my mind is wired now is that everything I do is what I do. Because the focus it takes for me to, like, right now, I'm running. I'm not like, a great runner. I'm not, like, injury free. So, like, my 1st 20 minutes of the run, I'm limping. I'm literally limping because I've had several knee surgeries and my body was twisted. And so now it's untwisting. So people look at me, oh, it looks like he's limp. You know, like limping when he runs. I am limping when I run. My body's jacked up. So I'm focusing on how to get the best out of a broken body. So everything I do is a total focus on what I'm doing at that point in my life.

Speaker A: So it seems like you've really trained away or somehow gotten away from the add that you mentioned, because what you described is a deep trench, like a v shaped trench. I'm imagining, like, there's a ball bearing. It's like. And it can only go forward in that trench or back, and it goes forward. It's not like sliding around at the, like, concave at the bottom, like, attention. So it's like you've trained that up. Is there a similar feeling when you're in the full focus of running versus full focus of studying? Is it kind of feel like, oh, yeah, that's the same groove, but different thing, or is it just completely different world?

Speaker B: It's a completely different world. It's just both of them. For me, it's suffering, but suffering a whole different way. Like, when I was going through school, I'll never forget. I think I was in third grade. And back then, you know, add AdHD, wasn't like, you know, here's this medicine, or here's this thing. They want to put you in a special school. So for me, I was so far behind in learning that their big thing was, let's just put him in a special school because he'll never learn. And through that process of, like, I don't want to be in a special school. I don't want to be treated any differently. It really, like, I never took medication. I've never taken medication for this. That's why right now you see me looking right in your eyes. What the hell is Truman saying right now? And that's why I don't feel bad for people who have ADHD, who have learned disabilities, and some are impossible because you just can't. But a lot of them you can. But people don't want to go through the process of focus, of teaching yourself how to truly focus. This is where my message gets lost. It gets lost. Cause I may say, you know, mf or f, you know, I may be. Cause that's the passion that comes out of me. Cause that's. It takes everything for me to learn a sentence. So when I speak about David goggins, I can't speak about David goggins in a way that's just calm and cool. Because when I wake up, I know the journey that it takes for me to find my greatness hard. Nothing is easy. Nothing. Just like, oh, I wake up and I just do this or I do that, or it just. No. I watch people every day go through life. And it's so easy for me to be where I'm at today. It takes every bit of me. So when I speak about it, and as I get going here, you'll start seeing me. The temple will rise, the passion will come out because I'm back there. I'm doing what I do every day to become a human being. And so nothing is easy like running is running. It sucks. But you have a choice to make. Do you wanna sit down and go back to that guy you once were? No. So this is what it takes. It takes that misunderstanding of people and they'll never get it. Cause they were never David Goggins. So that is what it takes for me to do what I do. It may take you something differently. So for me, everything has to be in the study and everything has to be into this. Everything has to be everywhere I am. It has to be there. Me. Focus where I am. That's why you're my second podcast I've done since Rogan, since the book came out. I don't have time for that shit. Because if I want to be great, I'm not trying to maximize money or maximize people knowing me. I do these things because maybe someone out there will understand me and get it and say, I can grow from this guy and others just won't.

Speaker A: Sounds like friction is something you're very familiar with. It's a word. Just as I feel like it's like, cast above us right now in bold face, highlighted, underlined letters.

Speaker B: Friction is gross.

Speaker A: Friction?

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: Like you're up in the morning and I imagine David Goggins going to the coffee maker, stretching out, good morning, sunshine. And you're telling me from eyelids open there's friction?

Speaker B: Yes. And that is the thing that people don't. They don't fucking get the biggest misunderstanding about David Goggins of all time. It's like whether you believe in God or not, I do. He put this lab rat, which is me, on this planet, and said, let me fucking see what a beat up, abused kid who has, who can barely learn, barely learn, who has a twisted body, messed up, messed up genetics, sickle cell, this and that. Let me give him everything that pretty much disqualifies you from the military. But back then it wasn't as. And let's put him in this and see what comes out of it. So to do that friction, you don't wake up in the morning time and go to the coffee maker. Matter of fact, sometimes you don't even sleep. What it requires is when I'm at 02:00 in the. It's 02:00 in the morning and my brain is thinking about a fucking drug, and I gotta get up and look in my book to see if that drug is how I remember it. And this is every day of my fucking life. That's why when I train a fighter or I train someone like, you have no fucking idea how great you really are, because you are using such minimal, minimal of what you have. And if people can learn to focus, this is what's possible. While it may not be pretty, like people want to do a documentary on me, I go, no, I don't want you to do a documentary on me because I will have normal everyday people picking me apart on his life is miserable. Who wants to live like that? He looks, it's crazy how he. It's almost like he's sick, he's psychotic. The most frustrating thing in the world for me is when normal people judge a man like myself on what it really takes to extract greatness from nothing. It takes every bit of who you are. If you choose that route, if you don't, merry Christmas. Do what you got to do. But yeah, all these things for me, like I told you, man, I'm gonna keep it real. I'm not coming here to talk about like, you know, perform without purpose. Cause I go through, when I write these books, I go through and I try to dumb down David Gagas. How can I give normal people, and I'm normal, but I found something that most don't want to find. How can I speak to people and give them something from this crazy psychotic brain that I've developed? How can I give them that? So I sit down with Jennifer for years and write down, perform without purpose. Callous your mind armor your mind. The cookie jar, the accountability mirror shit that people can fucking use in their lives. No, no, I'm glad it helps you, but the barbaric life that I live, that you have to live, the almost obsession that you must have to be great. You can't put that shit in a fucking book, bro. You can't put in a book. You can't. You can't write about it.

Speaker A: It has to be experienced.

Speaker B: It has to be experienced. And you can't even after you experience it, to write it in a book, it would seem like it needs to be locked up.

Speaker A: Too gory.

Speaker B: It's too gory. It doesn't make sense for a guy that everything, every second of the day, he is trying to extract more from something. He's constantly thinking. He's constantly, constantly disciplined, never going off the path. Whatever is injured on him, he figures away. It's a conqueror's mindset. And very few people, if any, can really understand what that is like. I'm almost 50, and I've been this way for almost 30 years. Like, what do you do for fun? You would never like these questions. I don't get them. I don't understand them. I don't.

Speaker A: So, yeah, I get asked that sometimes when you, for fun, I start listening off all the stuff like podcasting, reading, working out, but. So some of that resonates. But I think what's so truly unusual about what you're describing, your process, is that, you know, from go, it's hard. And I have to ask, was being 300 pounds, having essentially, I'm using the words you've described. You've said it before. You had a tendency at one point in your life early on, tell lies, try and get people's approval, pull my ass off, crazy haircuts, attention seeking. And yet all of that triggered something that now is extraordinary, right? Do you think those hardships were necessary to flip the switch?

Speaker B: I don't know if they were necessary, but it was something that made me feel. I didn't feel good. It was easy. The brain that I was given as a child, it was easy to go home and think about what? How do I want to be a freak today? How do I want to show up to school today and be a freak? It didn't require me going home and opening a book up saying, it's going to take me all year to learn this fucking page. So instead of learning that page, I learned how to become a character. And maybe that character that I created, that 300 pound insecure guy that used to fake it till I make it type of guy, you know, let me become your friend. Let me lie to you until you like me type of guy. When you have any kind of. Any manhood, womanhood, a human being, a soul, a spirit, any. I had no. I must have just this much pride. Cause that's exactly what opened the door for me. Cause every day you were a character. Every day you were a clown. Every day you open that spanish book or that science book or english book, and you, like, you looked at it, it was like. It looked like a foreign language. And you're saying, where do I start? Where do I start? And obviously it was necessary. The more I talk about it, it was necessary. Because what happened is I became haunted by the mere fact that this is my existence. And you got to live with that. Now I live with it for a lot of years. And so I sat back and said, okay, all right, I know what this takes. And when you sit back, as fucked up as I was, and I had a laundry list, a table like this, of what I have to do to become just a human being that can make ends meet, that can make $1,000 a month just to get there was like, oh, my God, dude. Like how they. I'm 1617. I can't read. I can't write. And I oh, my God. I'm so behind the power curve. And my brain is about being depressed. And my dad beat. My mom's not home, and kids are calling me nigger at school. And I'm like, oh, my God, man. What the fuck do I do? And it wasn't like someone came around and said, hey, man, you can do this. This is all me. Some people know, where does this cold man come from? I'm not trying to be cold. It's the reality of my life. It's the reality of a lot of people's lives. And so, yeah, that had to happen for me to be haunted. To be haunted, to pull out, to extract the God I am today. That haunting is something that's still there today. Because no matter how much you improve, no matter how much you change who you are, it's not permanent. You don't just wake up and say, oh, my God, man. You're David Goggins. You break records, you do this, you do that. People want to know, how are you able to just be so hard? Cause I never turned the fucking thing off. Cause once it turns off, I go right back to the David Goggins that is. And that's the guy that I'm constantly fighting every day. And it's a choice. And that choice makes you misunderstood. It makes you crazy. That's why I hate fucking social media. In 2013, people wanted me to write my book. I did it in 2018. Took five years. And the reason why I didn't do it, I set a table, and Jennifer was there. This is before she started working for me. I started dating or whatever, and all these people were there, and they're like, man, you gotta go on social media. And I was like, fuck you, man. Like, I'm not. It's poison. It's poison because I knew what I did to get where I am. And I'm gonna have these people, these normal, everyday people, fat, lazy, exactly who I was, judging me. Cause I know it. Cause I was once them. All my hard work, all my dedication. I'm gonna have some normal dude get his little brownies, little ding dong ho ho, twinkye, sit there with this coffee, picking me apart. Oh, he must be unhappy. He's just. Do you know how hard it is to put these shoes on every damn morning? I'm gonna have you pick me apart. So, yeah, there's. There's a. There's so much that goes into this that I was like, fuck this. I never want anything to do with it.

Speaker A: So, anyway, I'm not a psychologist, but knowing your story, from what you've written, what you've said on social media and elsewhere, podcasts, and here now especially, it's amazing to me, and frankly, it pulls at my heartstrings a little bit. I realize that's not what you're trying to do, but that in the course of your childhood and in your young adulthood, that no one ever got between you and the world. I forget where I heard it. That, like, if a kid has just one person that believes in them, you know, and I had my trials and tribulations, but I had great coaches, great mentors. I attached to them. I found them if they didn't necessarily find me. But I'm realizing that your situation was. No one's ever said, hey, I'm gonna stand here next to you or get in front of you, put a shield up. And so it's almost like you've got these different. It's all you, but there's versions of yourself that you knew. Social media, like, I don't know that I have the wherewithal in 20, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17 to get in front of myself while doing all this, because I've already got so much going on in here.

Speaker B: Right?

Speaker A: Is that about right?

Speaker B: That is right. But I had developed a lot of anger, and I still have it, and it would never go away for the normal human beings of this world. Because when you put yourself in the sewer like I was in, and please, if someone saved me, come out and announce it to the world. There was no one. There's no one. So when you know that, and then I'm sitting at a table with all these smart people who are telling me what to do and shit and guiding me through my life now, when I'm 40 fucking years old, you know, I was, I don't know, 40 something years old. Now I'm 49, and I'm looking at them all, and they're now trying to guide me on what's right on this poison. And so, yeah, what you say is right. But for me, it was more of, I know now I don't need you to guide my future. I know what's good for me and what's bad for me. And for me, it took every bit of focus I could. And I know social media. That's why people love to go on there, because they want to show you the good side of life. I'm not teaching good side of life. So I had to figure out a way, when I came on in 2016, of teaching you what life really is for the majority of us is hell. And so while people love to show you the cars and the house and the vacations and shit, all that's good, all that's happy, I'm going to show you the side that I know most you're going through. And people hide very well. I don't want to hide anymore. I hid for 24 fucking years. That's why now, I told you, we can talk about whatever you want. Because as human beings, the first thing we have to learn, I also stuttered real bad growing up. So if you hear me stutter every now and then, it's because that was part of my life also. So it's funny, human beings want to show you the best side, and they want to hide the worst side. For me, I'm going to teach you how to be vulnerable. Cause that's the only way you fix yourself. You don't fix yourself by coming out here and me selling you some fucking books. That's why I don't have them. I forgot them. I'm glad people got something from the book. I want you to learn that the only way you grow is how to look at yourself and say, okay, like, I did table longer than this. What the fuck I have to do to get somewhere? There was nothing good on there. Nothing. Yeah, I love playing basketball. I left that out. That's something I love to do. I don't care about that. That didn't make the fucking list because the list that I had to live by was the very list that was gonna get me at this table with you, to talk to you, to the normal human beings, which I once washed about how you can get somewhere and how it looks, looks very ugly. There's no fucking passion. There's no fucking motivation. There's no, oh, my God, man. I fucking, this is no, it's every day of your life just doing. No passion, no discipline, no motivation. All these words, I hate people. I hate that so many people fucking use these words now because it's watered. It's someone's sitting in a room by themselves and they figure themselves out and say, God, this is gonna fucking suck. Where's passion when you're 300 pounds? Where's the motivation when you can't read and write? Where is it? So how did this happen? I just fucking did. I just did. I said, maybe at the end of this journey there'll be something there for me. If not, I can read. If not, I'm 185 fucking pounds. There's not, there's, there's no magic potion. There's no, oh, let me wake up and look at some shit. No, all those words are overused. They're bullshit. It's all bullshit. Just do your living. How do you want to live? How do you want to die? How do you want to fucking be remembered? That's, that's it. That's it. Period.

Speaker A: I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, athletic greens. Athletic greens, now called ag one, is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink that covers all of your foundational nutritional needs. I've been taking athletic greens since 2012, so I'm delighted that they're sponsoring the podcast. The reason I started taking athletic greens and the reason I still take athletic greens once or usually twice a day is that it gets me the probiotics that I need for gut health. Our gut is very important. It's populated by gut microbiota that communicate with the brain, the immune system and basically all the biological systems of our body to strongly impact our immediate and long term health. And those probiotics in athletic greens are optimal and vital for microbiotic health. In addition, athletic greens contains a number of adaptogens, vitamins and minerals that make sure that all of my foundational nutritional needs are met and it tastes great. If you'd like to try athletic greens, you can go to athleticgreens.com huberman and they'll give you five free travel packs that make it really easy to mix up athletic greens while you're on the road, in the car, on the plane, etcetera. And they'll give you a year's supply of vitamin D, three, k, two. Again, that's athleticgreens.com huberman to get the five free travel packs and the year's supply of vitamin D. Three, k, two. The word haunted is ringing in my head.

Speaker B: Yep.

Speaker A: I think it's such a powerful word.

Speaker B: Yep.

Speaker A: Because I was about to say it seems like a huge part of your process, maybe the entire process is it's all stick. No carrot. You know, you talk about the carrot, the positive thing, and then there's the stick, the thing you're trying to avoid.

Speaker B: Yep.

Speaker A: I feel like it's, the way it's landing for me is it's all stick and gas pedal.

Speaker B: That's it.

Speaker A: There's no carrot. You're not imagining, oh, when I'm a paramedic, when the book is published, and obviously you set those goals and you make those targets, but it's all stick.

Speaker B: All stick.

Speaker A: No carrot.

Speaker B: Think about that. I'm waking up right now studying like I have a test tomorrow. I already passed the fucking test. Think about that. Every day of my life. That's what I must do just to retain what I learned. 4 hours plus a day, I go through and do that. There's no stick or there's only a stick. There's never been a carrot. Which is why when I speak to people, I have to figure out a way to resonate with them. Because all I want to say to them is, let me teach you the real life, how it really is, the reason why you're a loser and the reason why you're not fucking making it, and the reason why you're trying to go through all these. I go to all these fucking conventions, speak all the fucking time. I look in the fucking audience and these people sign up, sign up, sign up fucking every year to go to convention thinking they're going to learn something fucking different. No, you're lazy. You know exactly what to do. Exactly what to do. Because even me in my state of, I can't read and write, I knew exactly what to do. It just sucks doing it. It sucks to do it. It sucks to wake up every morning of your life and say, God, man, I'm not smart. So guess what I gotta do? I gotta study the same shit that I got one of the highest scores in the nation on and do it again. Do it again. Do it again. It's not just there. It's not just there permanently for me. So, yeah, it's all stick. It's all stick. The only care that you have is, like, maybe. Maybe. Cause whenever I take these tests that are real hard in the back of my brain, it's like, the good chance you're not gonna make it. Goggins, this ain't you, bro. This ain't you. You weren't born like this. This ain't you. The real you, bro. Study all you want to. But the second that fucking computer comes on with 150 questions, this ain't you, man. And somehow comes back, I passed, I passed again, passed again. But that ruled me back here. Every fucking time is saying, that ain't you, bro. That ain't you. And I have to outwork that voice. When I'm taking that test and I get to a question, I don't fucking know the answer. I'm like, fuck, man. And then say, I told you, man. That ain't you. You 300 pounds, man. You sit at home and figure out how to do your hair. That's what you do. How to come to school with the reverse baldness when you're 16. That's you. So there is no get out of jail free card. This is why I say stay hard. Because when you weren't given the gifts, the only thing you can do in life is stay hard. And I know people cannot stand me. They can't stand this talk. This is all you can do. There's no magic pill or a magic potion. All you can do is outwork the man that God created or woman in you. And what that looks like is unfun. That's why I said, do not do a documentary on me. Because people will not see the truth. They will see. What they want to see is, I don't want to live like that. Good.

Speaker A: Good.

Speaker B: And you will live exactly the way you live now, questioning who you are, wondering what is possible, wondering what you are capable of doing. That's how that looks. Or you can be me. Which am I happy? I don't know. Never really thought about it. Don't really care about it. Because all I really cared about was when I looked in that fucking mirror. I saw a piece of shit. Happiness wasn't on the mirror. At 16, around 300 pounds. It wasn't like, oh, my, I'm looking for happiness. No, I'm looking. Look at myself in the mirror and say, all right, motherfucker, you did it again today. You a bad boy. Cause that shit sucks. I have about a couple minutes of that. Got the carrot? The second I lay down and go to bed, the carrot's gone because I'm waking up all through the night to check the work I did that day. Did I get this drug right? Did I get this right? Did I get that right? What did I do? Oh, my God. Fuck. I'm already losing it. It's a stick.

Speaker A: That stick is haunting you, haunting you. It's following you around. So no picture of Jordan on the wall. You're not listening to YouTube. Inspiration video. Those would be all your voice anyway. You're not listening to your top ten favorite songs. Just to get rolling and then lace the shoes, hit the books. It's all in here, all in there.

Speaker B: I used to do that when I was fat. Rocky, that was my thing. Round 14 was my thing. And as I got older and older and older, that started to go away, and I started to create. I had all these people that I used to watch. Rocky was one Barnes Elias from Platoon, Jack from a few good men. You know, he's on the stand going crazy. I saw a lot of these characters that I looked at, and I was like, man, I ain't got none of that, but they were characters. After a while, I lived a life so disciplined that everybody that I once looked to these fake characters, I built that as a mandeh. And when I was younger, I had this image in my mind of, what does a man look like to me? And I got all these people who were badasses characters. And in my mind, I became that. And that's what kept me going a lot was I had this pipe dream of becoming a little bit of this and a little bit of that. Because when you have no parents raising you and you have no role models growing up, you. It's not daydreaming. You start to create a reality like, hmm, maybe I can be that. And after becoming this guy, that is the biggest thing I can ever do in my life, is I became that guy that I once looked at. All these guys now look at myself like, God, who the fuck can do that? I can. But what it takes is a discipline that no one can ever even. They don't understand it. They don't understand. Everybody has the ability to do it, but they just don't want to. They want to keep asking questions and keep going to seminars, and the greatness is right in you. And that's why, once again, I'll say this a million times here. I do not feel sorry for you. I will not sugarcoat what I'm gonna say to you, because all of you know what I'm saying is the truth. Everybody knows it's the truth. This is what it looks like, and you know it, too. You know it, too. This is what if you ain't got nothing, I hate to tell you, what it looks like is ugly. It's not a documentary. It's not an HBO special. You ain't gonna watch it. But, hey, man, you guys gotta watch this. No, it's like, oh, God, this looks like a train wreck. It's like a nightmare. This looks like this guy got. No, that's what it looks like. Hard work looks horrible. It's not motivating. It's not motivating at all. It ain't like Rocky round 14. When he gets knocked down, he goes like this to Apollo Creed. Looks like a man being stuck in a fucking dungeon, and there's no fucking way out. But you had the fucking key, but you refuse to use it. And that's nothing motivating about that. So, yes, no documenting on David Goggins.

Speaker A: The real life David Goggins is the documentary. It's already being written. You're it.

Speaker B: Right?

Speaker A: Yeah. I'm gonna share a little neuroscience tidbit.

Speaker B: Love it.

Speaker A: But I think it's one that you'll appreciate. Most people don't know this, but there's a brain structure called the anterior mid cingulate cortex. As we pointed out before, that's a noun. It's a name. It doesn't mean anything. We could call it the. The cookie monster. But what's interesting about this brain area is there are now a lot of data in humans, not some mouse study, showing that when people do something they don't want to do, like add 3 hours of exercise per day or per week, or when people who are trying to diet and lose weight resist eating something. When people do anything that they. And this is the important part that they don't want to do. It's not about adding more work. It's about adding more work that you don't want to do. This brain area gets bigger. Now, here's what's especially interesting about this brain area to me, and by the way, I'm only learning this recently because it's new data, but there's a lot of it. The anterior mid cingulate cortex is smaller in obese people. It gets bigger when they diet. It's larger in athletes, it's especially large or grows larger in people that see themselves as challenged and overcome some challenge. And in people that live a very long time. This area keeps its size in many ways. Scientists are starting to think of the anterior mid cingulate cortex not just as one of the seats of willpower, right? But perhaps actually the seat of the will to live.

Speaker B: Now we're talking.

Speaker A: And when I learned about the anterior mid cingulate cortex, I was, like, almost out of my seat. And I've been in the neuroscience game since I was 20. We're the same age. And I was so pumped. Cause I've heard of the amygdala fear prefrontal cortex. It's planning and action. I could tell you every brain area and every. I teach neuroanatomy to magical students. But when I started seeing the data on the anterior mid cingulate cortex, I was like, whoa, this is interesting. And all the data points to the fact that we can build this area up, but that as quickly as we build it up, if we don't continue to invest in things that are hard for us, that we don't want to do. That's the part that feels so goggin esque to me that we don't want to do. Like, if you love the ice bath. Yeah, I love the ice bath. And you go from 1 minute to ten minutes, guess what? Your anterior mid cingulate cortex did not grow none. But if you hate the cold water, if you're afraid of drowning and you get into water and put your head under, then your anterior mid and survive, then the anterior mid cingulate cortex gets bigger. But if you don't do it the next day, or if you do it the next day and you enjoy it, because, hey, hey, I did it yesterday. Woo hoo. Happy me. Merry Christmas is easy.

Speaker B: Merry Christmas.

Speaker A: Guess what? The anterior mid cingulate cortex shrinks again. To me, this is one of the most important discoveries that neuroscience has ever made, because it's that I don't want to do something, but do it anyway that grows this area. And it's almost like, I have a friend. He's been sober 30 years from alcohol, and he always says the amazing thing about addiction is there's a cure. The problem is it only works one day at a time, and so you have to renew it every day.

Speaker B: That's right.

Speaker A: So the anterior mid cingulate cortex, to me, when I learned about it, two things went off in my head. Whoa, this is super interesting. And two, I gotta tell David Goggins about this. And I waited until now to tell you because I felt like, well, for obvious reasons, I wanted to tell you, and I wanted to tell you here.

Speaker B: Well, I love that because that's how I've lived my entire life. I don't know anything about that. But people go, man, you have such a strong will. It's something that you build. Like, I never forgot I was on a podcast one time, and this dude goes, you were blessed with a strong mind. Like, the hell you talking about? It's blessed with a strong mind. That's something that you have to develop. You developed that over years, decades of suffering and going back into the sufferer. That's why a lot of people who graduate Navy Seal training, they want to know, like in my. I talk about very openly all the time. A lot of guys don't go, don't want to go back into that water. Don't want to go back into the hard stuff. Maybe not anything hard. Anything hard in life, once you get through it, it's like you become a pow. Like, how many pows you know want to go back to pow camp? None. When something sucks so bad in life, this is on this that we're talking about now. Very few people want to go back. They're happy they graduated. I realized I'm the same way. I don't want to go back. I have to go back. I must go back, because that is exactly where all the knowledge of my life exists was, back there. And what you exactly talking about? Well, I didn't know anything about this, but how I grew a will was constantly doing these things to now it's just life. I wake up while it still sucks. It's just life. You don't sit back and like, oh, my God, like, I have days. I don't want to do it, but I know I'm going to do it. I know from years of just doing it. So that's beautiful. And this is why I came on here with you today. And I'm glad that you're talking about this, because human beings need to hear this. They need to stop hearing these hacks on this and that. There's no fucking hack, bro. There's no fucking hack. Yeah, you may this and that and saunas and all this shit that they. Yeah, it's great. There is no fucking life hack to grow that thing. How do you grow it? Do it, and do it, and do it, and do it. That's the hack. The hack is gonna fucking suck. And that's what I realized. That's what I realized. Life. That's why I wanted to come on here today. I didn't wanna come on here and talk about no fucking passion and purpose and how to get the fuck out of bed and how to hit a fucking alarm clock and all this catchphrase bullshit. Cause that wasn't how I lived. That wasn't how I lived. I lived. I woke up like every human being does and goes, fuck, man, I'm a fucking piece of shit today. How the hell is this gonna work out for me? And you fight that, and you fight that. You don't override it. There's no override button. It's the conversation in your fucking. In your head. So how do you do that? We don't have enough of these conversations about the real conversation that every human being is having. And they have no idea how to get out of it, but they do. It's that shit right there, man. You gotta build your will. How do you build your will? Exactly what you said, man. Exactly what you said.

Speaker A: Well, I feel like knowing the name of something anterior mid cingulate cortex doesn't fundamentally change us. But one thing I like about biology is that willpower. If somebody feels they don't have it, feels like this thing that other people have. But everybody, unless they're brain damaged, like a hole through their head, has two anterior mid cingulate cortex, one on each side of their brain. Everyone has one. They have two. So I feel like it's just a question of opening the portal and the portal again, I say ten times, and forgive me, is I think people go, oh, I do hard things. I do sets to failure. And then I do four straps. I love training with weights. I love doing sets to failure. I even like four straps. But guess what? I like four streps. So I'll tell you, they don't build my anterior mid cingulate cortex because I like to do it.

Speaker B: That's right.

Speaker A: Anything you like to do is not going to enhance this aspect of willpower. And it seems so obvious once you hear it, you kind of go, oh, yeah, of course. But I think you really close that loop for people when you share what you're sharing today and what you've shared elsewhere before as well, when you're trying to explain, the friction is the critical ingredient. And I think people think, oh, if it's effort, well, then I'm getting better. That's part of it. Necessary, but not sufficient, as we say in science. But the suck part, the haunt, being haunted, the stick, they're really unpleasant terms.

Speaker B: Very.

Speaker A: These are probably the most unpleasant terms we've ever used on this podcast.

Speaker B: Very.

Speaker A: Those are the levers, those are the gears, and without those. This thing that you're talking about, David Goggins as a verb. I sometimes make the joke, but it's not a joke. Goggins is a name and it's a verb. People go, I'm going to Goggins. That. Right, right. But that's. I think again, I'm not a psychologist, but I think that's what you're talking about. The stick, the friction, being haunted. It's the suck part that grows this anterior midcingulate cortex.

Speaker B: So now you know why there's so many people that fail in this world. To figure out their purpose. Their purpose in life. Where do I go? Because to grow that. While you may not look like me, how my daily life looks but don't look fun. Don't look fun. So it's a choice that people have to make in life. But what's so funny about it is even the richest of rich who have everything, they always ask me this question. I feel like I'm missing something. I don't feel like I'm missing shit. I don't have what you all have. But you'll never in my life hear me tell you I'm missing something. Everybody is. They're missing this feeling. I found it long time ago. I found it right there in that willpower thing. When you're nothing, nothing. And change yourself into something like me, you call it happiness, peace, whatever the fuck you want to call it. People are missing exactly what went on with David Goggins. Why don't you smile? I do. I do. But I figured something out. That's why I am never. You'll never hear me say, I'm missing something. I found it years ago. You find it in the suck. You find it in the suck and you find it repeatedly in the suck to the point where you know exactly who you are. Most people are missing something because they don't know who they are. They never examine themselves. They've never done this experiment on themselves. The lab rat. We're all lab rats. But you're also the scientist. You create your own self. Most people are missing something. Cause there's so much trapped in there. I don't even wanna say potential. I think that's words used out too much, too. There's so much in you that God, or whoever the hell you believe in, or if you're atheist in you that you have not unlocked that you walk around with this gorgeous wife or great husband and all this money like God. I feel like I'm missing something. Yeah, because it's about 75% of you is still fucking in there, still chained up, because you just didn't want to find your willpower, didn't want to find your soul, your will, your heart, your determination, your guts, your courage. And what that looks like, it looks scary. Like your little scary lab. I went in scary to wake up every day and say, I'm stupid, but I want to figure out a way to be smarter, versus saying, man, I just can't do that. So you limit this box. So your box becomes so small of things you can do. My box wasn't even a box. It was a fucking little, like, little pinhole. And then through examining myself, getting some willpower, some courage, it became bigger than this table. But that's what we all do. That's why I wanted to come here today and talk to you about real shit. Not no fucking, like, hacks. There's no hacks, bro. It's you against you. You against you. And if you misunderstand that, you have a real problem. Real problem. I can understand. You misunderstand me running down the street, shirt off. Fuck this. Nah, I can. I can get it. I get it. If you misunderstand what I'm saying right now, today, the problem is you, and you don't want to fix it.

Speaker A: Well, the children of wealthy people are a case study in how not having enough friction can destroy a life.

Speaker B: True statement.

Speaker A: I mean, I could list off prominent names in the press, but those are actually the least interesting. What's probably more interesting as an example is all the ones we don't hear about, because we never hear about them. They just dwindle and wither. Or I think there's this big category of people. I'm realizing as we have this conversation today that they're not super successful. They're not struggling. They're successful enough that they never have to. You can get to the point where you don't have to impose friction. You even said it. Your bank account is in a place where you don't really need to do all the things you do. Probably not even a small fraction of.

Speaker B: Them do nothing, right?

Speaker A: But you realize the stick and being haunted is the fuel in the engine. And you'd be truly crazy to give that up because you've internalized all that. But most people, they're good enough for them. And so they don't actually want to be better badly enough in order to start going wrong after wrong.

Speaker B: Well, think about when you build willpower and think about how much I've built now that you know about this. I didn't know about this, but think about how much I've built, everything I've ever done in my life. I didn't want to do everything every day. I'm a lazy piece of shit, and I'm one of the hardest working people to ever step foot on this planet Earth. And I'm saying that very proudly because I know what I do. Not cocky. I'll tell you I'm stupid. And I'll also tell you the exact opposite of what I've done. It's the truth. It is the truth. So imagine how much I've developed in that timeframe. But this is the scary thing. Why most people don't want to do that and build that willpower is because it is scary. It unlocks a whole bunch of things about who you are and who you're nothing. And a lot of people don't want to go down that journey to discover who they are and who they're not because it's not a pretty journey. I mean, I've gone down it. It's not like I went down it once. I go down it all the time. And when you unlock that and you can't just turn it off, like, people say, hey, how come you haven't retired yet? I built all this willpower. Do you think it's gonna let me just retire because my knees hurt? It's telling me every morning I wake up like, man, my knees hurt, my legs hurt, my body hurts. But you can still run, so why aren't you running? If you can still run? There'll be a time when you can't lace them up anymore, but you can still run. So I still run. When the time comes, I can't run. The body will say, you just can't run. But if I can still do something, that willpower that I have created, it makes me do it every fucking day. And that's what they don't get. What builds a human being is you start with the small building blocks, and before you know it, man, you become something that you. It doesn't even make sense to most people because it's just who you are now. That's why I can still run. At 50, with broke, with. At Fortnite, we broke down knees and broke down body, because my body knows you still can. Therefore, I do. Second, you stop, the willpower is gone. And that's beautiful. I'm so glad you brought that to me because I always wonder, what's this separation thing now? At 24 years old, I started building something that I didn't even know was going to be what it is now at 49. And that's all it was, was just.

Speaker A: That this structure, anterior midsingulate cortex, has inputs and outputs from a bunch of places. But you'll probably not be surprised to learn that it's strongly activated when we move our body, when we don't want to move our body. I feel like it's like the David Goggins structure, right?

Speaker B: It really is.

Speaker A: It is. And it also has strong connections to the dopamine reward pathway. And everyone goes, yay, dopamine reward. Everyone loves dopamine. I'm partially responsible for people knowing a bit more about dopamine, but dopamine's badly understood. Everyone thinks dopamine. Dopamine hits. It's about reward. It's about motivation and drive. And there are pain inputs to the dopamine centers of the brain. No one talks about that. Everyone's like, oh, you want the chocolate, you know, chocolate, sex, cocaine. Yeah, that's all true. Release dopamine, pain releases dopamine. Anterior mid cingulate cortex can trigger the release of dopamine in response to this thing that we're calling friction. And that's a learned thing. That's something that no animal or human being comes into the world learning. We all are averse to pain and like pleasure, like sugar, fat, don't like hot surfaces. But this is a structure that learns. It has neuroplasticity, the ability to change throughout the entire lifespan. And here's the part that I think, again, is just neuro nerd speak. For what you already know and have done and exemplify is that people will say, oh, it has plasticity. You can change it, but guess what? It has plasticity in both directions. It can grow, but just as easily as it can grow. It's like silly putty. It can shrink, so it requires constant upkeep. And that answer isn't one that people are going to like. They're like, give me the energy drink, give me the supplement. Give me the sauna protocol that's gonna make my anterior mid cingulate cortex. Someone out there right now is going, wait, if I took transcranial magnetic stimulation and I stimulate. Yeah, you'd probably actually. They've done that. They stuck a little wire during neurosurgery into this structure. This is actually discovered by a colleague of mine, Joe Parvizi. Stimulate, and the patients go, I feel like there's a storm coming. And they go, oh, is it scary? And they go, no, I want to go through it. They come off the stimulation, and people are like, this is the seat of what we're talking about.

Speaker B: Right, exactly.

Speaker A: And it learns. So the fact that you kept this brain structure, I'm convinced if we imaged your brain, it'd be large and it would be larger in two years, in a year. But this is the no days off rationale, because it can grow and it can shrink.

Speaker B: I know what you're saying right now. I didn't know any of this. And I never. And I always talk to people. I wish I could just put this on paper. And you're saying it in a way that people can understand. I can never put into words on what I built and the power that is within all of us. But you put it so, like, in a scientific way, most people like, for me, he's just crazy. That's why I don't like talking about it, man. I know I'm not crazy. I know what I had to do to get where I had to go. People look at it as crazy because they're people that just. If you can't imagine yourself doing something, if you can't imagine yourself doing something, the person that's doing it is crazy. Because in your mind, the logic behind it, it doesn't compute. Therefore, you have to give somebody a title. And a title for me is usually, he's crazy. He's this, he's that. No, no. For some reason, me wanting to be somebody so fucking bad in my life, I created that. And I've been trying to figure out years of my life, trying to explain to people. But even though you're explaining it now, this is the easy fucking part. Them listening to this shit is the easy fucking part. The part that. Why there always be the ones of ones is because putting that practice, putting that into actual work. No, man. No, no. That's where the demons come in. That's where you're like, I don't want to be better. I don't want to be better. This is what it takes to be better. I don't want to be better. So everybody's. That's why there's a lot of average. And it makes me so fucking mad. Every day I walk this earth and I see average all over the fucking place. And they want to ask me, how did you do it? I can't tell you how. Cause you're not going to fucking. You're not going to do it. You're not gonna do it. You're gonna continue being out. Cause every day you wake up, like he says. It's not like, get the coffee, make the pancakes. Kiss the girl, kiss the kids. You wake up, right to work immediately. Your mind is in action. No one wants to do that. No one. And I don't blame them. But don't be mad when you're laying there in your fucking bed and you're in the fucking hospital, 70, 80, 90 years old, and you're thinking, man, I feel like I didn't fucking do something. Cause you did. You didn't do it. You didn't do shit. You may have lived a great life, man, but you're always gonna feel empty inside. I don't feel empty. So call me what you want. There's not one empty bone in my fucking body. Because I have figured out that really the magic potion, at least to my life, and it's very rewarding.

Speaker A: People like to talk about what they used to be able to do. I hear this a lot. You should have seen me in high school. I always laugh. Yep, okay, got it. And it's not just guys. You should have seen me working out in high school. I was super fit. People will look back to a time where they felt like they were capable of something, and now they're not. And you kind of want to just grab them and go, wait, that was you then. It's you now. But people tend to think about how the conditions that were around success must have been part of it. And you can understand why. It's like. It's very rational. I was in that situation. I was successful. I'm in this situation. I'm not. That was the past. This is the present. Ergo, capable, right? You see how people get into these loops. And as you mentioned, you spent the first 20 years of your life in extremely challenged circumstances. And then you can see how people get to a point where, like, everything feels hard. Like, when you're 300 pounds. I have never been 300 pounds, but I can't imagine it feels good to get up and move around.

Speaker B: It's defeating.

Speaker A: I got a friend. He's in excess of 300 pounds. We've been trying on him for years, but no wind. And he's got crazy psoriasis on the back of his calves. And he actually smells bad sometimes. Cause he can't wash as well as he would. He's big, big. And it pulls all my sympathy. But life is very hard for him in getting worse. He's a young guy with a lot of medical issues now, for obvious reasons. And so I think people like that think, well, it's already hard. Why would I make it harder? Your message is a little different. And you have the life experience.

Speaker B: It's a lot different.

Speaker A: You've been there. So for me, saying, oh, yeah, lose weight, you know, I was a skinny guy who got to be a less skinny guy. So I don't really have a foot to stand on. What do you say to those people who are like, listen, I'm getting up in the morning is hard. Trying to not dissolve into a puddle of my own tears and my own misery is hard.

Speaker B: You know why people connect with my book so well? For some reason, God put me in almost every fucked up situation on the planet earth. So when I talk to people, it's not sugar coated. Cause I'm not saying it from, I was 175 pounds my whole life. I don't say much to those people. Maybe you're a piece of shit. Maybe you're. You want to be nobody. Maybe you're happy exactly where you are in life because obviously you are. Maybe you don't have the determination to be somebody better than who you are. And if you want to live with that, I'll support you in that. If you're good with being who you are, that every day you wake up, and every day you smell like shit because you can't wash your body well and your skin's messed up because you help so bad and you can't put your clothes on right? You need help with that. You need help. Like when I was doing, I need help wiping my ass. That makes you feel good. Nothing I can say to you if every day you wake up with this. See, people are haunted, but they obviously like horror films because they keep watching the same fucking movie. I don't like horror films. A lot of people like horror films, so I don't say much to them. I say exactly what I said to you right there, because I was once you. I didn't like horror films, so I changed it. Some people are just, they become, like you said, it gets real small when you're lazy and you're fat. Your will, their will is so small that they don't have any, and you can't give it to them. There has to be something. This is. This is what I'm talking about now, because this isn't a Hackley. This has to be in you. Something in you has to wake up. And usually the only person that can wake it up is you. Sometimes you can read a David Goggins book because I was all this shit and then a lot more of fucked up. But if you don't have a little flame, you know, just that. Just barely, you're done. I can't. I can't light it for you. And that's the harsh reality of this life that I want to get across so fucking bad. You can watch me. You can watch you. You can watch fucking Rogan and Cameron Haynes, all these motherfuckers. You can go to Tony Robbins fucking bullshit, all this shit and do all this shit. If you. You could keep going back and keep spending money and spending money and spending money with no results, you can wonder, wow, maybe let me go try out David Goggins. He ain't gonna fucking help you. You have to explore, examine the insides of yourself. And what do you really want out of life? Your friend and a lot of people out here just don't fucking want it. So guess what? Have fun with your life. Go from three to 350 to 400 to 450 to 500 because you don't want it. And that's the harsh reality. I can't give you shit. You can't give them shit. We can give you ideas. But in the day when I was losing the weight, I had to miserably wake up every morning in the cold. Because it was Indiana, November when it started. I was miserable. This is your new life. Take it or leave it. There's no happiness about it. There's no peace behind it. It sucks. It just fucking sucks. And that's the one thing, if I could teach anybody anything, it just fucking sucks. And it's going to continue to suck. And then one day you'll get to a special part in your life that it might get a little bit better, but to lose the weight, you have to lose, my friend. Sorry. It's gonna suck every fucking day. Cause then when you're 300 pounds, you're gonna go out to lose weight. You could probably get injured. So then you gotta work on the injury. And then you get even more depressed. This is what I went through. And then you're hungry. Cause now you're depressed. It's just a vicious cycle. And if you're not strong mentally and you have no willpower, you're gonna continue falling back in this hole versus the man that sits back and goes, all right, motherfucker. This is why I cuss. Cause this is what is in me. This is what it took for me to be me. Sorry it didn't take. Hey. Okay, we're gonna do this today. No, this fucking really sucks. This is real, dude. This is real. And every day, I'm set back. I'm set back, I'm set back, I'm set back. So this is what I would tell your boy this is exactly what I tell them every day you wake up, you're gonna probably be set back for the first four weeks before you lose to significant weight because the mind's gonna be fucking with you the whole time. There's no dopamine. There's no dopamine in there. At 300 pounds, you got nothing. Your hormones are shot. You have to envision something that is more powerful than you. Something has to get you out of bed, and you have to create it. It has to be false because you're not it. You're a fat piece of shit, and that's the reality of it. So you have to create a false reality to live in that just to get to work on yourself. That's the reality.

Speaker A: He'll see this, and he'll appreciate that message. We'll see what he does. So, so far, last 13 years, it's been no movement. But I've had other friends who. Who were drug and alcohol addicts who quit after one conversation, never went back.

Speaker B: That's awesome. That means they won it.

Speaker A: Yeah. Just one guy. I won't out him, but walked up to me at a party in 2019 July 4 party and said, I'm a pile. And I go, what? And he goes, I'm a pile. Look at me. I'm 60 pounds overweight. I go, do you drink? He goes, every day. I go, how much? He goes, a case. He goes, I smoke a lot of weed. But he's successful in other areas of his life. And so I said, well, here's what I know. Quit alcohol and weed for you. I'm not telling people what to do. Don't eat until 02:00 p.m. get on an exercise bike and pedal in the morning like someone's chasing you with a poison dart till you want to puke. And I was kind of half joking, right? And then two months later, he was like, I haven't had a drink. I lost 30 pounds. He lost that 60 pounds. He never went back. Now he's super fit. It's amazing. So some people flip the switch. He is very self critical by nature.

Speaker B: That's what flips.

Speaker A: He's super self critical.

Speaker B: Yep. That's what flips the switch. Think about it, man. We know what to do. We don't need Angie Schubermandhe to tell us what to do. We know what to do. Every one of us. That's why he flipped it so fast, because he knew what to do. He didn't go by your exact protocol. He didn't go by the exact. No, he knew exactly what to do. And you just saying some shit to him and woke something up. He knew what to do. And that's the thing that people need to get, that you know what to do. Why aren't you doing it?

Speaker A: And I'm talking about myself now. You know those modes of just kind of passive consumption, they're so easy to wash over us. I used to have this thing, and I'm fighting this now because I knew we were gonna have this conversation today where I like to start things on the hour or the half hour, right? Worst practice in the world for me. Because if I miss that half hour, I'm like, it's 1233, I'll start at 1245, right? It's 1245, I'll start at one. I just lost time, right? And then. So. This is so stupid, right? And the other day, I was like, man, I gotta tell David about this. Cause my new thing is, I start no matter what time it is. If I wake up in the middle of the night, I got a friend. He paints in the middle of the night. I'm like, you're an insomniac. He's like, I don't know. I just do it. Then sometimes he goes back to sleep, sometimes he doesn't have. Everyone's got their thing. But I thought about this. I'm like, no more am I going to say I'm starting at one, because I know me, if I miss the 01:00 ding and my pen's not hitting the paper, not typing on the keyboard, I'm not going to do it. That's a self admitted weakness.

Speaker B: I love it, man. I had that for a lot of years. I know I'm going to do it. That's the haunting part. Is that going to happen? It has to happen, and that's a fact. Like, there's no get out of jail free card, bro. None. Like, that is a life that I don't know. I don't. I don't have that ability, or I have the ability. I don't have the. I'm not good enough, smart enough. I'm nothing talented enough to do that. Some people are. Some people can start at one. Some people don't have to start at all. If you lack talent, you can't sit back and say, I start in half an hour. I can't do that. I gotta start now. And after I get back from starting, I gotta start again. And then when I get done with that run or that study session, if it weren't good enough, I gotta go back again. Cause repetition is what taught me everything. So you can honestly outwork anything. But it's that you obviously are a very talented man.

Speaker A: Well, I have worked hard at certain things and built up some things that I've been good at most of my life.

Speaker B: You're amazed.