Jocko Willink: How to Become Resilient, Forge Your Identity & Lead Others | Huberman Lab Podcast 104

ANDREW HUBERMAN: Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast,

where we discuss science and science-based tools

for everyday life.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor

of neurobiology and ophthalmology

at Stanford School of Medicine.

Today, my guest is Jocko Willink.

Jocko Willink is a retired Navy SEAL

and author of numerous important books on leadership and team

dynamics and the host of the Jocko Podcast.

During his 20-year career with the US Navy,

Jocko served with SEAL Team 3 as commander

of Task Unit Bruiser in Ramadi, Iraq,

and elsewhere in the Middle East,

as well as deployments in Asia and Europe.

After retiring from the Navy, Jocko

used his experience and knowledge

gleaned from his time in the SEAL teams as a way

to develop tools that anybody can

use to develop their leadership skills,

both for leading themselves and for leading others.

That took the form of several important books,

the first of which was published in 2015

and is entitled Extreme Ownership:

How US Navy Seals Lead and Win.

He has also authored several books

for kids about leadership, personal development

and how to navigate various aspects of life.

I've read both Extreme Ownership and The Way of the Warrior Kid,

and I found them to be immensely useful

in terms of actionable information and understanding

of oneself and different kinds of relationships,

both in and out of the workplace.

Typically, guests on the Huberman Lab Podcast

are scientists and/or clinicians.

It was some time ago that I was a guest on the Jocko Podcast.

And during the course of our conversation on his podcast,

we quickly realized that many of the science-based tools

that my laboratory has focused on

and that I've used over the years

and shared on the Huberman Lab Podcast

had direct overlap and parallel with many

of the tools that Jocko and other members of the SEAL teams

had arrived at independently-- that is,

without knowledge of the underlying science.

And in fact, he had many more tools

that he had incorporated during his years in the SEAL teams

as well as in business leadership,

in family and elsewhere in life, that I quickly

realized it would be an enormously

valuable conversation to have him on this podcast

in order to share those tools with the general public.

During today's episode, we discuss numerous tools

that Jocko has taught and used over the years in a number

of different contexts, including tools for generating

more physical energy and for generating more focus

and cognitive energy.

And for navigating sticking points,

that is how to deal with lack of motivation,

how to deal with difficult relationships

in the workplace and elsewhere.

And perhaps most importantly, how

to think about and navigate the self.

In fact, we spend quite a bit of time

talking about this notion of the self and one's self identity

and how self identity plays into our ability

to engage in actions of specific types consistently over time,

where it can hold us back, how to gain better perspective

and how to help others gain better perspective so

that we can work better with them and them with us.

We also go deep into the likely scientific mechanisms

underlying why the tools that Jocko teaches and uses

are so effective.

In fact, one thing that you'll immediately notice

is that Jocko was writing things down

and I was writing things down throughout the conversation.

And that just reflects the fact that he's not just

an immensely powerful teacher, he's

also a practitioner and an avid learner.

He's always seeking knowledge.

So we kick back and forth our ideas

about what likely does and does not underlie different tools

and techniques, focusing, of course, mostly

on what works in the practical sense in the world.

What I can assure you is that by the end of today's episode,

thanks to Jocko's immense generosity and curiosity,

you will come away with a large number of tools

and much richer understanding of how to navigate and enhance

mental health, physical health and performance

in all aspects of life.

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.

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And now for my discussion with Jocko Willink.

Jocko Willink, welcome.

JOCKO WILLINK: Thanks for having me, man.

- I'm super excited and super happy to have you here.

- I'm glad to be here.

I know that you and I did five and 1/2 hours on my podcast.

So schedule is clear, let's go.

- Let's go.

And actually-- and people will see the Jocko GO drinks.

This is not some sort of promotional by me,

but these are the energy drinks I drink.

So this could be called the bring-your-own-GO podcast.

It is the energy drink I drink.

And no, I'm not told to promote that

or paid to promote that, it's just the one that I drink.

So there you go.

No pun intended.

I was just saying to our producer

a moment ago that rarely do I sit down and do

a podcast with somebody that's skilled in podcasting.

Lex Fridman would be the only person

that I've had on this podcast, I believe,

who's also a podcaster.

Since you're a podcaster and many other things,

I confess I'm a little bit intimidated.

- Well, it's a weird thing to actually call a skill.

Because it's something that I just kind of started doing.

It's something that you just kind of started doing.

It's something that Lex just kind of started doing.

And I never practiced it, I didn't

sit down before my first podcast and think about how

I should deliver things.

I just kind of did it, so.

Maybe it's just luck more than skill.

- Well, you and I actually go back further

than that conversation that we had on your podcast.

I think it might have been 2014, 2015,

and you were on the Tim Ferriss podcast.

And at the time I was living with my girlfriend,

we had moved from San Diego to the Bay Area.

We were living in this little, tiny apartment

in a basement in Oakland, trying to save up to buy a place

or rent a place that was decent to live in.

And we both knew a lot of team guys,

she knew more team guys than I did in San Diego.

Had dated a few, just to be direct.

Great woman, those guys were cool to me, mostly.

And I remember when I saw the photo on the top card

for Tim's podcast.

It was your face.

And I said, do you know this guy from San Diego.

And she goes, nope.

But if you had to draw a Navy SEAL, that's what you'd draw.

So I think for a lot of people, you

embody their notion of a number of different things,

some of which you talk about.

But some of which, when you open up a bit

and really get specific about work in the military

and work in daily life and what it is to be you, but really,

what it is to be a human being, some important contradictions

also emerge, right?

Obviously, discipline is a theme that people associate with you,

right?

In my view and I think in the view of a lot of people,

you embody discipline.

So today, I definitely want to talk about routines,

but also mindsets.

But also things that you do and ways

that you approach things that might not contradict, but not

be so obvious to people.

Might be a little bit counterintuitive.

And in addition to that, you have a lot of different aspects

to your life.

In addition to running businesses,

you're a family man, you have children

and married a long time.

And so you have a lot of knowledge

from different domains of life.

So with your permission, I'd like to dive into all of them

over the next 26 hours.

- Let's dive.

- Great.

I'm fascinated by this idea of sense of self.

I feel like all of us can look back to a time early in life

when we first had some experience.

Could be in art class, could be fishing,

could be sport, doesn't really matter

what the exact experience was.

But where we first realized that there are really

cool things in the world.

Like something that turned us on at the level of excitement.

Or maybe scared us, or something like that.

Do you have any recollection of such an event?

Maybe not the first one, but you ever

remember hearing or seeing something as a young kid,

and maybe you could tell us how young, and just thinking,

yeah, more of that please.

[JOCKO CHUCKLES]

- A lot of times when people ask questions

along this line of when was there a moment--

when was there a moment that you realized discipline

or when was there a moment you realized leadership

or when was there a moment you realized detachment,

kind of like your question, when was there

a moment you realized, for lack of a better way of saying it,

I'm a person.

I'm a person with my own thoughts

and I can make things happen.

And for me, all those answers are usually fairly gradual.

There's a little thing that indicates, you get a clue

and then you move a little bit further down that road.

Then you get another clue and then

you move a little bit further down that road

and you get another clue.

So that's what I would say, for me,

life was like when I was a little kid.

I was kind of slowly discovering that I was a person,

I was a human.

I remember my mom took me shopping.

I was probably about 10 years old

and I needed to get pants for school.

And my mom took me shopping.

And when I went into the store, there was a girl that was--

I don't know what they're called in a store.

A retail sales girl?

She was probably about 16.

And I started chatting her up.

And I kind of recognize it a little bit

but I sort of didn't too and I just was chatting to this girl

and I was making her laugh.

And I was having a good time with the whole thing

and putting on the pants and spinning around,

and she was laughing.

And I remember when we left the store with the pants

and my mom was sort of talking to me

about the fact that, "What were you trying to do to that girl?"

And I was thinking to myself, well, I kind of

liked that girl, she was pretty.

And I don't know why that popped into my head.

But I just remember thinking, hey man, there's

a whole world out there and let's go make it happen.

- Yeah, it's a great story.

Because I think it really speaks to this thing

that you mentioned, which is that when we first

start to realize we have a sense of self,

it has something to do with cause and effect on the world,

like we can have an impact in some way on things outside

of us, outside of our home.

Lately I've been reading a lot of psychology

and I've been listening to some of your content

and I definitely want to talk to you about a study

that you covered related to these--

it's a brutal experiment with these kids that either had

stutter or didn't have stutter.

I want to get into that a little bit later.

But what we do and how we treat people

and how we receive feedback and give feedback has a big impact.

But I think some of that happens just in our own relationship

to things in the world.

The older Hungarian psychologist, I'm learning,

had this idea of two kinds of people.

They literally thought there were two kinds of people.

There are generators and projectors.

And generators are people that are just--

from a very young age, they realize

they can impact other people, positively, negatively.

And they want to create things in the world,

they want to generate stuff.

And they go wow, I can actually build stuff and break stuff.

Blow stuff up, maybe, but also help things.

And then there are these projectors

that like to just reflect on what they see.

And they made the really important point, I think,

that it's not the generators are good and projectors are bad.

The world needs both, that they really work

in a kind of symbiotic way.

But your story captures the essence

of what it is to be a generator, which

is that by doing certain things, you can have an impact.

And it feeds back to you and it's likely

that they receive something from it as well.

- Yeah.

And where this all came to fruition, as I now piece

together as you're talking through this stuff--

Look, when I joined the military, you join the military

and you get a blank slate.

So no one cares where you came from,

no one cares what you did.

You were the captain of the football

team, captain of the soccer team, no one cares.

No one cares what your grades were,

no one cares what you got on the SATs.

No one cares about anything.

You're a blank slate.

And then with that blank slate, it is, hey,

if you do this thing, if you perform this task

and you perform it well, you will get recognition.

You will hopefully get more control

over your own destiny, which is the ultimate in compensation

for human beings.

To have more control over your own destiny

is the ultimate compensation.

You and I were talking before we hit record,

you can have all the money in the world,

but if you don't control what you're

doing every day or at least you don't

control most of what you're doing, then it's not worth it.

The reason people try and make money

is so they can have more autonomy in their life.

And so in the military, it becomes very clear--

and it became very clear to me very quickly

that if I performed well, I actually got a lot more freedom

with what I did.

Even in boot camp.

If you pass an inspection in boot camp,

you don't have to redo your locker

or you don't have to make your bed again because you did it

right the first time.

And so you have an extra 15 minutes.

And so for me, really, that's when

I started to realize, oh, what I'm doing right now is it

going to impact not only what's going

to happen to me in the next hour,

but in the next two years, three years, five years.

And I think that's the biggest miss that we have

when we're growing up.

And I know you had your challenges and tribulations

as you were growing up because you didn't realize, oh,

what I'm doing right now is going to affect where

I'm going to be in the future.

And it didn't happen until you were out of high school,

when you went to junior college and you're like,

oh wait a second, I can actually put my life together

in a positive way.

When you're 14, you're thinking, hey

what am I going to do tomorrow.

That's basically future operations or--

what am I going to do tomorrow.

- Would've been far ahead for me at 14.

I was like, where am I going to get the Slurpee, which curves

am I going to hit skateboarding and where are we

going to play video games tonight

or what girls are we going to hang out with.

That was kind of the mindset at 14.

- Yeah.

And then at some point, you learned, and so did I,

oh, the actions that I take now are either

going to positively impact my future

or they're to negatively impact my future.

And the more I focused on doing things

that are going to positively impact my future,

the better my life became.

And I think that's a very huge lesson

to learn that I know I didn't figure out for quite some time.

- Yeah the idea of investments and withdrawals,

or understanding that early in life

in terms of health behaviors and intellectual behaviors.

And your point about the military

is a really interesting one, I never

thought about the military that way,

that there's this blank slate when you get in there.

And before we started, we were talking a little bit

about the kinds of mindsets and people

that the military attracts.

And I'd love for you to elaborate on that again.

You mentioned something interesting,

this notion of garrison.

- Interesting word in its own right.

What kind of people do you think the military attracts?

And then within the military, do you

start to see some kind of predictable bifurcations, where

certain people go down one track and other people

go down another?

I have a few friends from the SEAL teams, as we both know.

And I've heard sometimes about the distinction

between officers and enlisted guys, this kind of thing.

But maybe this question I'm asking

is more across the board for all of military.

And for people listening, whether or not

they are interested in military or not for their own life,

I think there's an interesting lesson, this idea of who

is attracted to the military.

Is it like people who want to instill order on themselves

or is it people who want to instill order on other people,

or both?

- Yeah.

There's a really good book and I ended up

doing about four podcasts on this book, which

is called The Psychology of Military Incompetence.

And when I first saw that--

- What an amazing title.

- I know.

And when I first saw that title, I thought to myself,

oh, this is some academic that's going to look at the military

and bash it.

But I did a little research and it turned out

that the guy that had written the book--

I can't think of his name right now--

he was a guy that had served in World War II, was wounded.

I mean, this guy understood what he was talking about.

And it's really an obvious concept

once you think about it.

The basic premise is this, the military,

when you look at it from the outside,

it's this orderly place.

It's a place where everything has a place.

It's a place where if you have a certain rank on your shoulder,

you will command respect and people have to listen to you.

That's what it looks like.

So it's an attractive place for people

that have an authoritarian mindset, for people that

want to just, hey, don't question what I'm saying,

just shut up and do what I tell you to do.

There's people that love that.

There's people that want to live like that.

You've worked for them, I've worked for them.

We've experienced those type of people throughout our lives.

That authoritarian mindset that just

want to bark orders and have people listen to them.

And so when those people are 14 years old or 16 years old

or 18 years old, they look at the military

and they see a uniform.

And they see people saluting and they

see orders being carried out.

And they think, that's where I'm going to go.

And I can get the respect that I deserve.

And the military certainly attracts people like that.

And those people that have that highly-disciplined and orderly

mindset can do well inside the military,

especially in garrison.

Again, we were talking about this earlier, the word

garrison.

I don't think there's a civilian equivalent to this word,

but it basically means the noncombat situation.

So when you're out on the parade field,

when you're going through schooling where

there's no combat involved, when you're marching.

Those kind of things, we call that garrison.

It's in the rear.

It's not in combat.

And the people with an authoritarian mindset

actually do pretty well in garrison situations.

Why?

Because things are orderly and you can predict what's

going to happen.

And you do get a certain issue of gear

and that gear is going to be delivered on time

and you're going to shoot this number of rounds

down at the range.

And everything is going to go according to plan,

that's what garrison is.

And so those people join the military,

they're attracted to that and they end up

doing well in peacetime.

Now unfortunately for them, combat is a lot different.

Nothing goes the way it's supposed to go.

The bullets don't get delivered on time,

the enemy has a vote on the way things are going to unfold.

And you end up in combat being in very chaotic situations.

So the type of person that thrives in combat

has a more open mind, has a more flexible mind,

is paying more attention to the input

that they're receiving as opposed to someone

with an authoritarian mindset.

They don't listen to anybody else.

They make up their own mind, they bark orders.

With someone that has a more open mindset,

they're listening, they're taking input,

they're evolving their plan.

And those type of people excel in a combat situation.

Now unfortunately, and this is sort of the stereotype too, you

take that dog of war and you put him back

into a garrison environment, he doesn't do well.

He's not showing up on time for the inspection,

didn't get his haircut, he doesn't have his weapon cleaned

the way it's supposed to be cleaned because he's

got his weapon ready for combat, not ready for inspection.

And so you get this-- there are these two different types

of people.

And of course, with those two different types of people,

there's degrees going one direction or other.

But what you hope for is someone that

can play the game on the garrison side

and yet when it comes time to go into combat,

they can also open their mind, be flexible, be creative.

That's what you really want is you want someone that is

very good at solving problems.

And to do that, you need to have a creative, open mind to figure

out how we're going to deal with something.

So I think that's the stereotype.

The stereotype is that everyone in the military

is sort of robotic and falling into the hierarchy,

and we bark orders and people follow orders.

And that's just not true.

There is an element of truth to it

but it's not the whole truth.

And certainly, if you look at it history, the people that

excel in combat are the people that maybe have

a little bit of a rebellious streak,

people that are just more creative and more open minded.

- Some of my friends from the SEAL teams

will sometimes throw out stereotypes

about the different divisions in the military.

Is there any truth to this idea that Air Force types are

one way and Marines are one way and Navy is one way,

army is a certain way?

Sort of a general contour of personality

or is that just kind of inside ball, joking around?

- It's a little bit of both.

I mean certainly, the Marine Corps is steeped in tradition.

And if you make a guess at what a marine--

if you had to guess what a marine is going to be like,

you're probably going to be pretty close.

Marines have an incredible program

to indoctrinate their people into the culture of the Marine

Corps.

And the Marine Corps has an incredibly strong culture.

It's a powerful culture.

I love the Marine Corps, I've worked with the Marine Corps

a ton and they're outstanding.

As a generality, certainly you could make those assumptions

about the Marines in general.

Now, does that mean that every Marine is the same?

No, absolutely not.

Same thing with the army, same thing with the Air Force,

same thing with the Navy.

You've got these kind of stereotypes

that exist for a reason.

It's interesting too.

One of my friends named Ben Milligan

wrote an incredible book called By Water

Beneath the Walls, which I've given him

a huge hassle about because it's the worst title of all time.

But it's certainly the best book written

about the SEAL teams' history and where

the SEAL teams came from.

And it's interesting, it's something

that I had heard from a SEAL officer that

had given a speech years ago at his change of command.

And what he said was he was trying

to emphasize why the SEAL teams were good.

And one of the things he said was in the army--

and he was talking historically-- he goes,

hey, in the army, if you start to lose a battle,

you can just retreat and run away.

In the Navy, traditionally, we're fighting on board a ship.

And if that ship--

we can't run away.

We're fighting and if we lose, we die.

So SEALS can't quit.

It was this, a little over the top, expression.

But when you take that a little bit further,

when you look at the history of the Navy.

If we were in the Navy 150 years ago,

you would have to go on deployment.

You would take your ship and you would sail somewhere

and you wouldn't be able to talk to me anymore.

So you would have to understand what

it is you were trying to accomplish

and then just go out there and make it happen.

That's decentralized command.

And that's something that exists in the SEAL teams

without question, very decentralized command.

And that's one of the absolute strengths of the SEAL teams

is you've got leaders at every level inside the organization.

That if they don't know exactly--

if they're not told what to do, they're going to go,

OK, I haven't been told what to do

but I'm going to go figure it out.

And that's one of the strengths of the SEAL teams.

We have more doctrine now, but when I came in the SEAL teams,

there was no doctrine.

It was all word of mouth.

And so the army and the Marine Corps,

if you have to conduct an ambush,

you can pull out a manual and you

can look up how to conduct an ambush-- platoon ambush,

how to conduct it-- and it's all written very clear.

And they're great documents.

That's the FM 7-8 infantry platoon and squad,

I think is the army doctrine.

- I can see the little neurons in your hippocampus firing

in sequence.

- Yeah.

- It's embedded in there forever.

- And it's a great manual.

And you can pull that thing out and you

have a place to start from.

In the SEAL teams, we didn't have that at all.

So you would hear from your platoon chief,

this is how you conduct an ambush.

And he had heard it from his platoon chief, who heard it

from his platoon chief, who heard it

from his platoon chief, and that platoon chief was in Vietnam.

So it's getting passed down but you can make adjustments to it.

And you can alter the plan a little bit because hey,

the terrain is different, or hey,

the night vision we now have.

So there's changes that we can make

because there's no doctrine.

So not having any doctrine, in many ways, is a strength.

Also it can be a weakness.

Because if you've got a new platoon commander that's never

done an ambush before and he has no idea what he's doing,

this platoon chief has been out of the loop for a long time

and he doesn't know what he's doing, there's no reference.

So there's strengths and weaknesses,

just like any characteristic.

Everybody's characteristics, you've got strength

and you've got weaknesses.

And your weaknesses can be strengths

and your strength can be weaknesses.

To get back to your original question,

are there stereotypes inside of each of the military branches?

Sure.

But are there outliers in each of the military branches?

There are absolutely.

And that's why you can't judge a book by its cover.

- For people listening to this who are not in the military,

maybe have some military lineage in their family

or not, but who want to understand a little bit better

about how structure and lack of structure

can both support being effective in life,

in relationships, in daily life, in fitness, in business,

in school--

I think those are the big domains--

in creative endeavors.

I think it would be useful for them to understand a little bit

about how you in particular balance discipline

and structure with, dare I say, lack

of discipline and structure.

- Well, you could actually just say

the word freedom, because that's what it turns into.

- Or maybe even play.

I bring this up in part because I've

seen some posts that you put up of you playing the guitar

with friends or music.

One of them was a tribute to someone

who either was killed in combat or had passed away.

So these moments of connection between people

sometimes are working together, but sometimes

are in relaxation and play, in these kinds of things.

I think it was a really important post for people

to see that while Jocko Willink kicks back with a guitar,

not trying to take over stages--

maybe you are.

Maybe you have a plan.

If anyone could do it, you'd probably be the one.

But what is the balance for you in terms of structure

and lack of structure?

And I'm not going to ask for your daily routine.

We know that you get up early, you train.

But I do have some specific questions

that I think would be helpful in putting some meat

on the notions about you.

And again, this isn't a pick into your life

but more to grab-- well, it's to pick into your life.

The-- so a question I asked you in the lobby

because it's one that having seen

your content for a long time and really benefited from it,

I was curious.

You get up early at about 4:30, you

train every morning, how long do you train for?

And is there any global structure to that?

And, of course, everyone needs different programs,

but is it like weight training one day,

cardio training the next day, or you're combining them?

Is it always an hour or is it always half an hour?

I think people would benefit from getting a little bit

more understanding of what that looks like for you,

with the caveat that everyone has different needs

levels of background, et cetera, but I'm

intensely curious about this and I'm

certain I'm not the only one.

JOCKO WILLINK: So do you want to talk about weightlifting

or rock and roll on the guitar?

ANDREW HUBERMAN: I want to talk about--

let's your let's talk about the most structured first part

of your day, and then let's talk about the least structured part

of your day, at least the part that you

can share with the world.

JOCKO WILLINK: Yeah, waking up early

and I'm going to work out.

And depending on what's going on that day,

if I have an early flight, I might work out

for eight minutes.

I might go in and do 2,000 meters on the rower,

get a sweat going as hard as I can, and then I'm done,

and-- because I've got to go catch a flight.

So that could be happening.

Maybe I'm supposed to go surfing in the morning, I wake up,

the waves are terrible, and so now I've got nothing to do.

I planned out to be surfing for two or three hours,

and now I'm not going to go surfing,

so I'm going to go lift and I'm going to go play in the gym

and do a bunch of stuff.

I'm going to spend two or three hours in there.

I love doing that.

So the workout could be anywhere between what

I just say 8 minutes and 3 hours,

and it could be anything in between.

I fully enjoy the physical aspect of working out.

So if I have more time to spend in the gym, I'll spend it.

I remember my dad saying at one point,

if I retired I wouldn't know what to do.

And I was thinking to myself, are you serious right now?

If I didn't have anything to do, I'd spend six hours a day

in the gym, I'd spend four hours doing jiu-jitsu I could fill

my day--

I could fill every day with just physical activity, things

that I just like doing.

So wake up early, get a sweat going.

And do I lift?

Yes.

Do I do cardio?

Yes.

Do I run?

Yes.

Do I sprint?

Yes.

Do I lift heavy weights?

Yes.

Do I swing kettlebells?

Yes.

I do everything and anything, and I enjoy all of it,

and I'm not really good at any of it.

I'm not really good at any one aspect of physical activity.

There's people that are infinitely better at me

in every aspect, and I'm not just

talking about, Oh, this guy's a world-class, no.

There's like a guy named Fred down at the gym that can

deadlift more than me, there was a guy--

when I was at SEAL Team 2, there was a guy who was,

it's probably 5'7", and he looked kind of chubby,

and he was older than me, and he could run faster than me,

and he could bench more than me.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: Those guys are out there.

JOCKO WILLINK: It was just so bothersome.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah, they're out there.

They've got some engine in there related to something.

I mean, I do think there are genetic differences in terms

of people's resilience and workout,

but even just grip strength is highly, highly

subject to like genetic influences,

maximum grip strength.

But of course, there's a huge range

in what people can develop.

But I guarantee your grip strength is greater than mine.

People ask me this all the time, who

would win in arm wrestling between you and Jocko.

JOCKO WILLINK: You know there's a lot of technique

in arm wrestling.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: I have to imagine

they're putting their body behind it,

they're putting their back in that.

JOCKO WILLINK: There's a legitimate technique

in arm wrestling--

ANDREW HUBERMAN: Which worked for me yet.

JOCKO WILLINK: No, if we could bring a female arm wrestler

in here that knows how to arm wrestle, because I don't know

how to arm wrestle either, and she would beat both of us

because there's a lot more technique in arm wrestling

than most people recognize.

There's all these little games that are going on.

There's all this little arm position that you get.

So just like everything else, it's technique.

There's a lot of technique in arm wrestling.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: That's good to know.

I didn't know that about arm wrestling.

I think we all start off with some genetic predispositions,

both good and bad, for different things, and then there's--

as far as we know, there's a huge range

based through neuroplasticity and muscle adaptation,

et cetera, in what we can obtain.

So I never want genetic predisposition

to serve as a barrier.

No one knows also what the upper limits of any of these things

are.

And some of the best examples we know from sport and certainly

from academia are people who knew

they were at a disadvantage and just

worked 10 times harder than everybody else

because they had an ax to grind with

their genetic disadvantage, which is

really cool at the face of it.

I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge

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So you get the training, and do you track your training

in a detailed way?

Are you keeping track of lists and--

JOCKO WILLINK: So I write down what I do,

and I'll write down--

I write down what I do every day.

And that way, I can go back and say,

what was I doing back then?

Because I might go through some phase

where I'm trying to do more pull ups

or I'm trying to deadlift more and I'm trying--

whatever the thing is, I'll go back

into-- because I get bored of deadlifting after a while.

And let's face it, if you just want to be a good deadlifter,

you're not going to be that fast.

You're going to be slow on long runs,

so you don't want to go too deep into deadlifting.

And you also don't want to be so good at long runs

that you can't deadlift a good amount of weight.

So I kind of go through phases, and I'll

get into something for a while, and then

I'll get into something else.

So I do log down what I'm doing so that way I can look back

and say, Oh, dang, I'm not even close to as strong

as I used to be, need to get back to that.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: I'm fascinated by the concept of energy.

I think it's one of the most interesting aspects in all

of biology, all of psychology, and all of life.

And when I say energy, I mean the distinction

between being back on your heels,

flat footed, or forward center of mass.

And I get the impression, and I think

everyone gets the impression that you're

somebody with a lot of energy, and I wonder whether or not

you wake up with a lot of energy and you

feel like you have to burn it off with this physical activity

and work and other demands in your life,

or do you find that you wake up and your energy

is kind of neutral, and exercise and physical activity

gives you energy?

Because I think this is one of the key things out there,

I think, that acts as a barrier for people

doing more with their body because maybe they

don't want to tire themselves out

or maybe they don't feel like they have enough energy

to begin with.

It's also feeds into this idea that some people just

have a lot of energy.

They're really physical, and other people aren't.

So let's just say on most days do

you wake up feeling like you want

to burn off energy, build energy, what

is exercise mean to you?

And then maybe we can talk about some

of the underlying stuff going on there because I think we

both might find it interesting.

JOCKO WILLINK: I would say it's both.

There's no way I could sit here and say, oh, yeah,

every day that alarm clock goes off,

and I'm like, oh, yeah, let's rock and roll.

No, certainly that's not the case.

It's also certainly not the case that every day I'm

like, oh, god, not again.

No, I'd say most of the time the alarm clock goes off,

and I don't think a bunch.

When my alarm clock goes off, I don't think a bunch.

I don't debate with myself.

I'm not negotiating.

The thing goes off, and I'm doing what I'm supposed to do.

Sort of robotic.

Now this much I can say, when you go and work out,

you're going to feel better.

You will get energy from working out.

That is a guarantee.

If you go work out, you're going to feel better.

If you go break a sweat, you're going to feel better.

You're going to get more energy from it.

And look, you got to go really, really

hard to where now you feel more tired when you're done.

And even that, I mean, you've got to go psycho.

I'll do that occasionally, but I don't do that on a daily basis.

At the end of the day, if I wake up, lift, run, surf,

and then I do jiu-jitsu in the afternoon,

at the end of that day, I'm tired and I feel tired.

But normal day working out just makes you feel better.

Definitely gives you-- definitely gives me energy,

I should say, because I guess I'm not everybody.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah, I think it's a very important point

because one of the things that we are learning from circadian

biology, time of day effects and sunlight and all that stuff

that we talk about in our podcast

that you've done intuitively, this

is what we kind of arrive to.

JOCKO WILLINK: It's kind of crazy.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: As last time we had a conversation

is that so many of the things that science

is telling us to do and that we emphasize

on this podcast you've been doing

or are built into military schedules, and one of them

is this notion of waking up early

and getting physical early in the day.

And I suppose if we were to just throw one blanket

rule on the table to encompass the broadest number of themes

it's that once every 24 hours, we each and all

get a big increase in this release of the hormone

cortisol, which everyone says, oh, cortisol it's terrible,

he's going to burn you out, adrenal burnout, all

that stuff, but it's a non-negotiable peak.

And you want it to arrive early in the day and viewing

sunlight, physical activity, caffeine,

and in particular intense exercise,

all amplify that cortisol peak.

In fact, I think the numbers I'm seeing

is just sunlight viewing gives you

a 50% increase in that cortisol.

Exercise on top of that, another 50% to 75% increase.

So this huge release in this hormone that everyone thinks

is terrible but actually sets this huge wave

in motion for the rest of the day, which gives you

more energy, higher levels of immune function, more focus,

et cetera, and does indeed as you mentioned

in your example of your daily life sets

a timer so that about 14 to 16 hours later, you're sleepy,

which is what you want 14 to 68 hours later, unless, of course,

you're running vampire shifts in the military

or you're on shift work, but most people aren't, of course.

So I think the idea that movement and exercise gives us

energy I think is an important idea and it's something

that frankly I was hoping your answer would be that, as

opposed to that you wake up every day

and you just want to just attack the world because you have

so much energy getting out of bed because frankly, I

never feel that way.

But I always feel better after I train.

Always.

And of course, there are times when

I crash in the early afternoon if I train really, really hard,

but usually that's when I over-caffeinated

to an outrageous degree, and then I don't nourish after,

or I over nourish.

So this is the other thing that eating, the whole rest

and digesting, the digest word in there is meant to--

it's there for a reason, which is

that when we eat a really big meal,

we actually need to slow down.

So I hate to get into daily schedules

at the level of nitpicking, and nutrition

is about the most controversial topic on the internet,

but do you nourish after you train?

And if you do, do you do it to the point

where you're kind of like, OK, I'm mostly full or I'm full?

Are you trying to really nourish yourself,

or do you find that eating slows you down?

JOCKO WILLINK: I find that eating slows me down.

And I would say, again, it's weird how some of this stuff

is.

The main reason I got in the habit of waking up early

and working out is because if you do it

before anyone else is awake, then they can't bother you

and you can get stuff done.

You go to the SEAL Team and you get

there before anyone else is there, no one can say, hey,

can you help us with this?

Hey, no one sent you an email.

So you get that time, you get it done, and it's yours.

I remember when you were on my podcast,

and I don't wear sunglasses when I run in the morning

because I sweat and it fills my sunglasses.

It's not because I want to let the UV light into my eyes,

that's not cortisol.

It's not for the cortisol.

I didn't know that.

It's cool that I know it now, but I just did it

because I don't like to sweat in my sunglasses,

can't see, so I just run without, I don't put a hat on.

As far as eating, I don't like to do physically active things

with food in my stomach.

That's just the way it is.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah, me either.

JOCKO WILLINK: And so I don't want it.

And what really keeps that in line

for me is I'm doing jiu-jitsu in the afternoon,

and so if I'm eating a big lunch,

by the time the afternoon rolls around, I'm kind of I

got food in my gut, and I just don't like that feeling.

So no, I don't eat a big meal until I'm

kind of done with the physical stuff for the day, which

is usually at night, 6, 7 o'clock at night,

which I guess there's some bad things about that I

eat too late.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: Well, the data say if you're--

yeah, we could go down a rabbit hole with this

and then someone's going to pull up

some little clinical study and then another one

that counters that.

I mean I think the data essentially

say that having a regular meal schedule that

allows you to sleep well at night, whatever that means

for you, and that allows you to be active and focused when

you need to be active and focused,

that's the ideal schedule.

JOCKO WILLINK: When I'm working with clients,

so I have a leadership consulting company Echelon

Front.

When I'm going to work with a client,

I'm not eating because they're going to be asking me

questions, we're going to be diving into what's

happening inside their business, there's

a lot of stuff going on.

It's a lot of cognitive work.

So I'm not eating before a podcast.

I'm not eating before a podcast.

Before I'm recording a podcast, I'm

not eating because I don't want to have

a bunch of food in my stomach.

You get a certain level of mental clarity

when you haven't eaten a bunch of food.

So going out on missions, I never

would eat before I go out on a mission.

I would eat when I come home.

You get home at 4 o'clock in the morning,

3 o'clock in the morning from doing operation, cool,

then I'll eat because then I'm going

to do a debrief for 15 minutes, clean weapons,

and then eat a big meal, go to sleep.

Cool.

Yeah, I don't want to have food in my stomach

when I've got to perform or execute anything.

So again, I think that's just kind of a fluke

that I ended up living like that,

but that's kind of how I live.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: It's a fortunate fluke

for all of us because so much of what you embody

and what you do I think centers around this idea of discipline,

of course, but also energy.

It's the intuitive sense I get about why people are so

drawn to your messaging and what you do and how you do it.

Energy we know, of course, is caloric energy.

And I think that's what most people default to.

They go, oh, how many calories are energy

and how many calories in that and you need calories

to fuel things.

But the energy that you're describing I think

is the one that--

well, it really maps the Eastern traditions more directly

to how yin and yang thing--

yin and yang, I always get that wrong-- so which

is the notion of neural energy.

And so there's a particular cluster of chemicals in us

as a fancy name called the catecholamines.

But that's dopamine, epinephrine,

which is adrenaline and norepinephrine,

and then you've got cortisol.

And those four hang out together and basically give us

enough energy to run our brain and body for 50 days.

50 days.

So the idea that you have to eat before you train, sure,

for some people that might work better than others,

but I think what people don't realize

is that anytime we're taking in caloric energy,

it takes neural energy in order to digest that and put it

into storage.

And so the way you describe your day of, yeah,

I also don't eat before I train.

I like to hydrate and caffeinate.

I have been drinking these before I train.

I have to limit myself to two before because otherwise, I'm

like picking up--

I'm already quaking a little bit at the second one.

But I have a pretty high caffeine tolerance.

So I like to train first also.

And then I find it gives me energy.

But then the moment that I eat a meal that's a little too large,

all of a sudden I'm out of energy.

And what's the deal?

These calories are energy, right?

You're supposed to have energy in order to think and move.

And I think I think a lot of the world has this backwards.

And this isn't a push for intermittent fasting

or any particular style of eating really,

I don't care if people are carnivores, vegan,

doesn't matter to me whatever works.

I happen to be an omnivore.

But I think once people understand

the energy to do things is neural,

and yet, of course, it relies on having glycogen and all

this stuff around, but neural energy is what's really about,

then your schedule and the way you function

and the way you describe your schedule

really makes a ton of sense.

So you described getting up and lifting, running, surfing,

and jiu-jitsu in the same day.

So on a day like that, you're hydrating, correct?

JOCKO WILLINK: Oh, yeah, definitely.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: Because that's vital.

And I know in the Teams, in the SEAL Teams,

there's a lot of discussion about hydration is important,

even though you guys I know are supposed

to be able to eat sand and survive on sunlight and dirt

and drink your own blood.

JOCKO WILLINK: Not me.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: Hydration is taken seriously, right?

JOCKO WILLINK: Yeah, and different people

need different amount of hydration.

And I, unfortunately, was one.

I always needed to bring a lot of water

in the field which sucked because water is heavy.

And I have friends.

One of my friends, Tony, BTF Tony, he'd go in the field

with like a can of Copenhagen and coffee in his canteen

and go like three straight days--

ANDREW HUBERMAN: He's like a desert turtle.

JOCKO WILLINK: He's a desert rat, man.

He could just survive.

And I would always have to bring this water.

I sweat a ton when I work out or when

I'm doing anything that requires physical output.

I sweat a ton, so I have to drink a lot of water for sure.

But not everyone's the same.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah, I think if most people focus more

on hydration and movement.

They would find they have two--

I'm going to venture a guess here,

this is not a scientific study, but two to four times more

energy than if they focused on caloric energy and what to eat.

JOCKO WILLINK: Yeah, and I think the cool thing about this,

you're using the term energy.

And what's cool about this is you or I create energy.

I create energy by, like I said, by going and lifting

in the morning, by going and doing--

you go do burpees?

You go do 100 burpees like you're creating energy.

You're going to be tired, you're going to be sweating,

but you just created energy.

So that stuff is totally true I'm

glad there's neuroscience to back it up.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah, I'm actually

thinking about devoting some of my lab to this.

One of the best examples, another familiar territory

for you is cold water.

Nowadays there's a lot about ice baths and cold baths

and showers and all that, and I always like to just say,

listen it's all just a reliable source of inducing

adrenaline release.

And you get out of a cold shower, you have more energy,

and that energy couldn't have been caloric energy,

it's adrenaline.

And again, it's fair to say I'm obsessed

by the ideas of identity, which is a little bit how

we started off and I want to get back to it, and energy.

I feel like identity and energy can

account for 75% of what it is to live a good life

if you can master those, because then it

all seems to fall into bins.

Of course, you need sleep.

Why?

Well, to restore your neural energy.

At some point, you just fade out of neural energy

if you don't sleep.

So sleep then falls into a particular bin

with a particular purpose, and then exercise

becomes not a way to burn energy but,

as you said, to create energy.

And we actually are starting to understand

why this is if you'll indulge me for a second

on some neuroscience.

We didn't talk about this last time.

We have neural circuits that control deliberate action.

We have neural circuits that control deliberate actions

that when we forget that we're doing like walking.

And then we have neural circuits which

are called central pattern generators.

And these are the neural circuits

that love to just work on their own, and in the background

just kind of hum in the background

and take care of all the stuff like heartbeat, breathing

and movement that is repetitive.

If you're just marching and you don't

have to adjust your cadence much,

or maybe you're hiking even and stepping this rock,

that rock, once those central pattern generators get going,

it's very automatic.

And we know that once your central pattern generators get

going, there's the release of those catecholamines,

those three or four molecules that then feed

all the other neural systems.

They're called neuro modulators for a reason

because they set the gain higher.

So when you go out for a run or a jog or a hike or something

or you pedal or you row, and then

your whole system is at a higher RPM

so when you say create energy, neuroscientists

are starting to understand what that is, repetitive movement

that allows you to forget the motor commands that

are required to generate that movement.

You might think about your row stroke or something like that,

but you can do it without thinking much.

You come off of that and you now are set at a higher RPM

to do more deliberate stuff.

And none of this, again, involve like eating

enough carbohydrates or making sure you had enough ketones

or enough protein.

It's like you got plenty of that stuff

provided you nourish at some point every 24 hours or so.

I think we know a little bit about the science behind Jocko

Willink's schedule now, but I will ask this,

are there certain forms of exercise

like weight lifting versus cardio

that you find give you an especially big boost

in what we're calling energy?

And here this could be cognitive energy,

it could be physical energy, a readiness for the next thing?

JOCKO WILLINK: Yeah, first I got to back you up on this.

I love backing up your science.

So do you ever ruck march like put on a heavyweight and ruck?

ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah, sorry to interrupt.

Yeah, Peter Attia got me into this.

He got me into doing a long Sunday--

instead of a long Sunday, run throwing

on a lightweight vest or a ruck, and going out

for like three hours.

And the first 20 minutes, I find I always

want to go faster and get it over with.

But then I've learned that the real pain in it

sets in around an hour, and then the beauty

sets in around 90 minutes, where you're

like, I could do this all day, all night,

and I never want to stop.

JOCKO WILLINK: See that's when you were describing

how these chemicals get released,

and once you're in that automatic mode--

because in the SEAL Teams, you're

doing Maritime operations for a month,

and then you're going to do some kill shooting,

and so you're not carrying a bunch of weight.

And then you go out to the desert

and now you're putting on 80 pounds

and you're going on day one, and you get out there,

you're going on an 80 pounds ruck march.

And the first freaking 17 minutes, the first 23 minutes

just suck.

They just suck.

And what was beautiful was by the time I

was 23, 24 years old, like, oh, yeah,

this is going to suck for 17 minutes,

and then it's going to be--

I'm going to be a robot and it doesn't matter anymore.

I can just keep going forever.

So now it sounds like what you're

saying is what I experienced basically my whole adult life.

There's going to be a little break in period mentally

where you think this totally sucks,

and then you just can keep going for a really, really long time,

and it's not that big of a deal.

To your question of is there any form of exercise that gives me

that energy, I would have to say like the high intensity

sort of anaerobic blast, whether it's on the bike

or on the rower or swing and a kettlebell hard, something

like that that lasts 10, 15 minutes, that's

a really good way to peak my mentality for the day.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: Do you do the cold water thing?

I mean, you certainly did a lot of it in BUD/S. I mean,

do you force yourself into cold water and the you release--

JOCKO WILLINK: I have a cold bath in my house,

and I get in every day.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: How long are you spending in there?

JOCKO WILLINK: Usually around five minutes.

Five minutes.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: Before you train or after you train?

JOCKO WILLINK: After.

So this is something I haven't played with yet,

and for me, I'm like such a--

I don't like to make a bunch of effort for something.

So for me going downstairs getting in the ice tub--

and I guess you only need to do it--

before you work out, you only go a minute, right?

ANDREW HUBERMAN: You do a minute to three.

Joe and I have been texting back and forth about this.

There's a lab at Stanford, Craig Heller's lab that

works on cold and performance, and the athletes

at Stanford, mainly the cross-country team

and the football players are doing

cold before their training because of the huge increase--

huge long lasting increase in dopamine and adrenaline that's

caused by that.

They're finding it increases performance

mainly by waking people up and getting them--

it creates energy, basically.

And students, everyone thinks of like, oh, athletes

are all super motivated.

This is no pick against Stanford athletes in particular.

A lot of athletes are excellent at what

they do because they're very lazy when they're not training.

This is true.

Not all athletes, but a lot of athletes are.

And so they're really good at resting and recovering

so they can train more.

But a lot of athletes have a hard time getting into gear

to train every day, and the cold is a great stimulus.

It's like a four shot of espresso kind of stimulus

without all the jitters.

JOCKO WILLINK: I think maybe going in there for a minute

would be cool before a workout.

I will say this.

So I had a long workout and it was a Saturday, which means

on Saturday I do jiu-jitsu in the morning around 10 o'clock,

and I had like a long workout, went for a long run,

it was hot, and I just got in the ice bath

and I sat in there for like 7 minutes like the deep chill.

I got out and then I went right to jiu-jitsu, and I felt awful.

I felt absolutely awful like tight cold,

and it took me an extra three rounds to get warmed up again.

So that kind of left a bad taste in my mouth for pre-work icing.

But I'm going to try this short because I was talking

to another friend of mine, they're like, oh, no,

only go a minute before.

Maybe I'll give that a try.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: If it's really cold, 30 seconds to a minute

is going to get you this big release

and adrenaline and dopamine.

JOCKO WILLINK: Actually one time I

did try the chamber that blasts cold air on you.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: The cryo.

JOCKO WILLINK: Yeah, the cryo, and I

did that for like a minute or whatever,

and that did make me feel pre-workout pretty good.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah, I think that the whole notion of cold

for metabolism, people say, well, it's

not that big of an increase in metabolism, look,

as far as I'm concerned, the main function

of the cold for most people is going

to be the discipline of doing it, the sense of resilience

that you can build up over time just being familiar with having

adrenaline in your system.

And then the fact that the dopamine increases are huge

and long lasting, I mean, they're like 2.5x increases.

There's a colleague of mine at Stanford,

an alumni who runs our dual diagnosis addiction clinic.

She had a patient getting off cocaine addiction who

decided to use cold ice baths as a way to kind of assist himself

along the way.

He wasn't getting dopamine from cocaine anymore,

so he decided to get it from the ice bath.

The difference is cocaine gives you these sharp increases

and then decreases that drop you way below baseline,

so what do people do if they go seek more cocaine,

it's really pernicious that way, whereas the ice bath

and cold showers will give this long arc lasting two

to three hours or more.

And that's really something to treasure,

the idea that you can basically save on your heating bill

give yourself this huge dopamine increase.

And I think everything points to the fact

that it's healthy and good but I mean

obviously it's working for you to do it after your training.

I think all the gym rats who want more hypertrophy you're

trying to get an extra 1/8 of an inch on their tricep

or whatever, they freak out because they hear that it

can inhibit hypertrophy.

And then for whatever reason, there's this--

JOCKO WILLINK: So am I doing it wrong?

ANDREW HUBERMAN: Well, I mean, yeah, clearly you're

doing it right now.

No, you're not-- I don't think your hypertrophy is suffering.

I actually am of the mind that if you're

training really hard, sure, getting in the cold afterwards

might blunt some hypertrophy that is what the data tell us.

Andy Galpin is kind of the expert on that literature.

But frankly, I don't know anyone that

trains really hard with the weights

and then gets into the cold that looks like they're

suffering from hypertrophy.

I know a lot of people, however, who

love to point fingers at and poke at cold exposure.

This seems to be a big thing on social media.

People who don't like the cold love to point out

the studies showing that the cold screws up everything,

and most of them look like they can eat a few sets in the gym

to me.

And I feel comfortable with poking at them

because I feel like all of these are just tools.

And in any case, I'm a big fan of deliberate cold exposure,

mostly for the neural effects.

Again I'm obsessing over this concept of energy,

and it's something that I can't help but ask

that is the cognitive side of this and the effects of winning

and losing.

So you obviously have a lot of deployments

and a lot of wins, whatever in the context that meant.

Kill the target, capture the hostage, et cetera.

And then as is the case with war,

there have been some cases of losses.

You've lost people.

Maybe there were targets that weren't accomplished,

this kind of thing.

And you've posted about these, and these are always

things that are hard to see, but I

think it's really it's important that you

post about people that you've lost because, first of all,

these people served, but second of all, things

don't always work out the way that we want,

and sometimes to really catastrophic consequences.

There's a theory in biology that when we win,

we somehow get more energy to win more

through the release of, no surprise, dopamine

and some related molecules.

And in fact, testosterone in both men and women

is another close cousin of the dopamine system.

They're actually released from the same general--

patterns of release are from the same general areas

in the brain, believe it or not, and body.

But when we win, we feel like we can keep going.

You look at the team that wins and it's

like they'll play another game.

The Super Bowl winners you imagine

they're jumping up and down, and they could probably

play another Super Bowl.

Losing we know can sure can drop things

like testosterone and dopamine for some period of time.

But when you were in the Teams what

was your observation about how winning and losing

would impact people in the short and long term?

In other words, would you observe

people that had a quick reset button

and could just say that was terrible, and then transmute, I

guess I'm getting into the Eastern language

now, to convert that into energy to go do better the next time?

Whereas we also see people, military

and in the civilian world that a loss,

in particular severe losses, basically set them

down the path of less energy, and certainly

is in less calories.

In fact, most of the time it's the other way.

They start consuming more calories

and that doesn't get them going.

So again, this notion of energy, and now I'm asking,

wins versus losses what did you observe

and from the perspective of leadership,

and maybe more importantly from the perspective of yourself,

how do you work with that?

How do you calibrate wins and losses?

How do you transmute losses into energy?

Because winds we know we convert to energy,

but losses oftentimes can sup our energy way, way down.

JOCKO WILLINK: To start with, I think

that the selection process to get into the SEAL Teams

is going to weed out a bunch of people that can't recover very

quickly from something bad.

So you probably heard these type of stories before.

The kid that was the star of the football team,

the star of the basketball team, the captain of this,

the captain of that, he's been winning his whole life.

He goes to BUD/S and he quits, because in BUD/S, you're

not going to win.

You're certainly not going to win everything.

They're going to find what you're not good at,

and they're going to exploit that, and you're going to lose.

This is what happens.

So a lot of guys that may lose and it

disrupts their motivation, they're probably

just going to quit.

And so that's why you get this massive attrition

rate with guys that are studs.

I mean, we're talking Division 1 athletes.

Division 1 athletes, Division 1 wrestlers,

Division 1 football players, Division 1 runners

and swimmers.

They all come to BUD/S. They all quit.

all of them quit but there's plenty

of examples of the highest level of collegiate athlete in sports

that translate very well to what you're

doing in basic SEAL training, and they quit.

And sometimes it's because they don't know how to lose,

they don't know how to recover from a loss, and they're just--

so I think already once you get to a SEAL Team,

you've got people that are generally speaking,

going to be pretty resilient when it

comes to dealing with a loss.

Not only that, I mean, you just get

used to talk about losing people,

you're friends with this guy, you

meet this guy in SEAL training, hey, this guy

seems like a stud, oh, he's just going to quit.

And you're going to lose five, six,

seven people, eight people.

People quit so fast you cant' even keep track of them.

So you're just going to lose.

You're just going to get used to it.

So there's that.

Now once you're in the Teams, what you're

talking about is now you start taking much more

significant loss, you're not losing a race,

you're losing of one of your friends.

And this is what from a leadership perspective

you have to pay attention to.

So when you're a leader in any organization,

you're basically in charge of a mob.

When it comes to what their morale is, they're a mob,

and they feed off of each other, just

like a mob riding in the streets going,

oh, we can break this window.

Let's break all the windows, and they move this mob mentality.

And that happens with morale inside of a team.

And you as a leader can't get caught up with the mob.

You can't let that happen.

You have to detach yourself from the mob mentally so

that you don't get caught up in their emotions

and their morale because if you get caught up in their emotions

and you get caught up in their morale, you can't correct it.

So we go out on a mission, the mission goes great,

we get into a gunfight, kill a couple of bad guys,

everyone's OK, high fives, everyone's feeling great.

You come back to base, hey, we don't need a debrief.

That was perfect.

Hey, we don't need to get our gear maintained,

we can just go to bed, we're awesome.

That's when the leader has to say, oh, we've got the mob

and the mob is becoming slightly arrogant.

Hey, guys, real quick, that was a good op,

but there are some things we could improve.

You got to bring that mob back and bring them back

to center line.

Same thing in the other direction.

You go out an operation, it doesn't go well.

You go out an operation, you take casualties.

Now you come back to base, you see guys moping around,

you see the spirit starting to break, and same thing.

If you're part of that mob, you'll be with them,

your morale will be breaking, your spirit will be breaking.

You've got to look up and say, oh, I see what's happening.

Hey, guys, listen up.

That was tough.

Didn't go the way we wanted it to go.

We need to learn some lessons.

Here are some things I can do better.

What can we do better to make sure that never happens again?

What can we do to make sure we have the opportunity

to go out and avenge our brother on the battlefield?

What can we do to move this thing forward?

So as a leader when it comes to winning and losing,

you're generally going to be the person countering what the mob

mentality is because when the mob starts winning,

they want to keep winning and they might get arrogant.

When the mob is losing, they might

start to lose more because their attitude goes down the drain.

So that's where you have to pay attention to

from a leadership perspective.

For me personally, I know what I did

when I lost guys was focused on, all right,

we need to celebrate the life, we need to mourn the loss,

and then we need to go to work.

We need to get our gear back on.

We need to lock and load our weapons.

We need to get back out there.

I know that that's what we needed to do.

So often, the best way to contend with problems,

with issues, with adversity is action, is by taking action.

The more you sit and the more you

wait and the more time you spend with that adversity

with the upper hand inside your head,

the worse it's going to get.

So for me always taking action, making something happen,

it doesn't have to be huge, it doesn't

have to be some mammoth triumph that you're

going to go and pursue, but if you say,

hey, listen, this what happened.

Didn't go the way we wanted it to.

We're going to get our gear back on.

We're going to go back out.

We're going to do this other mission.

And that's what I think.

Taking action, and it's in your personal life too,

something doesn't go the way you wanted it to go,

you didn't get the job you wanted,

you didn't get the hire, you didn't get the promotion,

you can go home and sit there and dwell on it.

That's not getting you any progress.

Or you say, OK, you know what, let me do a quick analysis why

didn't I get that promotion.

Oh, it's because I didn't get this qualification

or I hadn't jumped through this gate.

OK.

Cool.

What do I need?

Let me look into how do I get to jump through that gate

so next time I will get the promotion?

And you start taking action.

So action for me is a cure for a lot of problems

that we have in life.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: I love this because the image that's

arising my mind, I'll share it with you

and tell me where it agrees with and maybe violates what you're

telling me, but what I was imagining it when you were

talking about leadership in the mob is a bunch of candles,

but not wax candles, these are oil candles.

And you're talking about a win, so it

could be an op to go out and win, it could be a team,

it could be an individual taking an exam and they get an A-plus,

it doesn't matter, but they're riding high.

I mean, those winds we know crank up those catecholamines,

and it's as if the intensity of that flame

starts going up as a consequence.

That's natural.

But the oil and the candle is continuing to burn down.

Like you need to celebrate wins, but you're burning that oil.

And so what we're really talking about here

is how to moderate and then reclaim energy.

And I was imagining as the leader who

like OK, guys, great, but listen,

you're burning that oil.

That oil is what got you the win.

Let's not just clamp it like we can do a few fist bumps

and maybe celebrate it in some other ways,

but then let's take the energy we got

and put it to the next thing rather than just go crazy.

Drugs of abuse, in particular drugs

that tap into the dopamine system, namely cocaine

and amphetamine, and just because there's no way

to avoid this if we're being true to the biology,

the energy the dopamine system was

designed for foraging for all sorts of things,

food, so people that overindulge food or seek out

food, sex, people that overindulge in these things.

Those things, and again this sort

of leans to Eastern philosophy a bit but,

there's Western neuroscience or neuroscience

we should just say to support it,

you start to deplete these dopamine systems.

The baseline starts to drop.

And so I'm imagining that the leader, you in this case,

is saying like, listen, let's tone it down,

use the energy that we've gained and put it to good use,

rather than just burn it up enjoying it.

And then, of course, after a loss when those--

I sort of think of the candles going dimmer

but the oil reserve is still there,

and it's like how do you start to tap back

into the oil reserve?

Well, you have to actually ramp the candle up again.

You can't just sit there waiting for the intensity of the flame

to come back.

You actually have to do something in order

for that to happen.

So maybe this isn't the best analogy

because it lacks exactly what is the person turning

the intensity up and down on these candles,

but that's what comes to mind.

And in Eastern traditions, there's

this idea of Qi of energy, energy to fight,

energy to seek mates, energy to seek food, energy for sex,

energy for all of it is the same energy.

And I actually believe that the energy that they're referring

to are these catecholamines.

I really do.

Now there are other energy systems too

relating to child rearing, pair bonding, oxytocin,

all the kind of fuzzy warm stuff, that's super important.

I mean, we wouldn't exist as a species

the way we do we didn't honor that energy system also.

And that energy system that we normally think of as love

as opposed to forward center of mass synergizes

with this system.

When you're working with and training with and people

that you love, this could be your brothers, your sisters,

whatever, your family, I think there's an amplifying

effect on this whole thing.

If is just for more dopamine, just

for more money, just four more wins, just four more trophies--

I'll never forget this as an aside.

When I was a kid, I had this weird experience

where Tony Hawk's dad rescued me from a skateboard contest

in Linda Vista.

The Linda Vista Boys Club, everyone else

left, I was left there alone.

I was 14 because of my home life at that time, et cetera,

and he was like, where are you going?

I'm like, I'm going to take the bus to Lancaster.

I know this guy.

And he was like, no, no, you're coming to our house.

I was like, OK.

So he took me at Tony's house, and I went into Tony's room

that he had grown up in.

Tony lived in Fallbrook at that time.

And the room wasn't filled with trophies.

The room was trophies and I remember just

thinking like, holy cow.

And when I think about that and I

think about what a healthy person Tony turned out

to be because I happened to be blessed

to know him a little bit, it's amazing

because a lot of people that had those

trophies whatever domain of life,

they converted all that into ways to just burn the oil down

in their candle.

He's a guy who's still going in his 50s.

So that's a little side story, but I

think this notion of energy to me

is so important because, as you said,

when we move toward action and we complete something,

the oil in that candle starts to get replenished,

and the flame burns hotter.

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JOCKO WILLINK: What you're talking about

and I'm very interested in this now,

and I don't know if there's already been measured

or not, but what essentially we're talking about

is the confidence level.

So if I go out and win, I feel good about it.

And let's say I'm doing a jiu-jitsu tournament,

and the first match I go out there

and I submit the guy in 30-- take him down, submit him

in 30 seconds.

I'm feeling good.

I'm feeling confident.

So what does that mean?

My dopamine is up because I got that victim.

My testosterone was up because I got that victory.

My confidence is up because I got that victory.

Same thing other direction.

If I go out first match and I lose to somebody,

my dopamine goes down, that chemical thing goes down,

my confidence goes down.

And what I have to do is I have to learn

how to maintain a level of confidence because if I get--

if I win that first match, win the second, I'll say,

I'm going to kill this next guy, and I go out and I'm sloppy

and I don't care.

That's when I get caught.

If I lack confidence, I go out there

and there's nothing I will do to beat this guy, that's

going to be horrible.

Of course, I'm going to get smashed.

So it's a similar thing that we're talking about.

I just wonder how much if you start

measuring because they say, hey, if you win,

your testosterone goes up.

And then if you win more, your testosterone goes up high.

Your dopamine goes up high.

Your confidence is going up, but you can get to a point

where your confidence is too high,

and now you're getting sloppy, and now you don't care.

And you mentioned cocaine.

You see like videos of people that are all coked up

and, hey, I can do this.

They think they can do everything.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: All possibility.

JOCKO WILLINK: Over confident.

They're over they think they can kick your ass off.

That's like too much dopamine, too much ego,

too much confidence.

The other side of the spectrum is

someone that's on some kind of downer drug,

and they don't feel like they can do anything.

They're lethargic, their confidence is low,

and they're just depressed.

So there's an interesting tie-in between dopamine, ego,

confidence, and probably testosterone

that you get from winning and from losing.

And once again as a leader, from a leadership perspective,

you can't get wrapped up in that.

You can't get wrapped up in that.

You have to detach from it.

You have to be able to take a step back.

And then if you're good even as a competitor,

you'll say, oh, yeah, that last match was easy,

but I need to prepare for the next match.

I can't bring over confidence.

Look, I don't want to lack a confidence.

It's a balance.

It's that flame on the oil burning lamp

that you're talking about, that you want that steady flame.

You don't want too much going to burn out of control.

You don't want too little, the flame will go out.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah, earlier we talked about this notion

that some of these older Hungarian psychologists

had which this notion of generators versus projectors.

And their idea was that people sort of divide

into these different categories, and the world needs both.

It's not a that one is better than the other,

but the world absolutely needs both.

And there is this idea now based on some neuroscience

and some other psychology that I've

been kind of glazing into which is that generators

know how to tap into the system, and they love this system.

I think back to your story about being taken to shop for pants

and it turns out to be a trip to shop

for a number of different experiences for you.

A really telling experience, having an action effect

on the world and something coming back to you that still

sits with you inside.

In fact, there's a dopamine circuit

there still related to this young woman

or then young woman at that time.

Some people are generators and I think

that they are more attuned to this dopamine system.

And so as we're having this conversation,

I'm guessing that about the estimate

is that somewhere between 50 and 65% of people

are going, yeah, I get it.

More workouts are going to give me more energy.

I need to do more of that.

I need to win I'm back on my heels.

I need to think about the things I can complete, et cetera.

And then the other 45% or so or 35% might be saying,

I don't really get it.

Now the idea is that the projectors can

tap into these same circuits.

Everyone has these catecholamine circuits, dopamine et cetera,

but that they tend to be more of observers in the world

and they like being partnered with

and symbiotic with these people.

Now this starts to take on stereotypical masculine,

feminine things, but this exists on both sides, it really does.

There might be some biases by biological sex,

there may not be.

We could argue that.

It's probably an argument that'll

get us into more trouble than to answers,

and doesn't really matter.

The point is that some people are perfectly

happy to be in the company of people

winning because they feel good to see other people winning.

They like to be a support staff.

That's what makes them feel good.

Other people would rather stick hot forks in their eyes

than not be the person engaged in the activity.

Maybe not every activity but the activity.

So we're talking about the generators and the projectors.

I think that in the context of moderating these systems,

it's so key.

I mean, it's key to have a long arc and a career path,

military, science, or otherwise.

I think it's key in every domain of life.

And I think for me, one thing that I've

learned both the hard way and I've also

benefit from the positive experience of,

I think in relationships, l this could

be romantic relationships, but also friendships

and in family, because there are generators and projectors

almost always in those kind of symbiotic relationship,

romantic couple or a family, some kids are more generators,

some are more projectors just by something, who knows?

Maybe it's hardwired, maybe not.

As the leader of your family, I'm

going to assume one of the two leaders,

but as a leader in your family, I'm

not going make any assumptions here,

as the leader of your family, and also

as a father in particular, how do you

apply these same sorts of ideas when

you know your kid is kind of down because it's

hard to be a 14-year-old or because it was a bad day,

or when they're up?

I think the up states are as interesting as the down states

like, yes, got the degree, got the win.

How much do you let them celebrate

before you're like, hey, listen, you just

got yourself another couple of milliliters

of oil in your candle, what are you going to do with that?

You're going to burn it, or you going

to save it for the next thing so you can climb the staircase?

JOCKO WILLINK: Well, clearly it's

a very similar thing to what I just talked about.

If your kid is doing well and wins the wrestling tournament

and is like, yeah, I won the wrestling tournament,

and what do they want to do?

They want to eat a triple cheese pizza,

I mean, they want to go crazy and you as a leader

and as a parent and as a friend, you'd say, hey, man,

I mean, you did good.

That was awesome.

You had a great day, but let's start

thinking a little bit about next week too.

How about we just have a few slices of pizza as a reward?

So this is the same in any situation

that you could be in interacting with other human beings.

You want to be the person that kind of modulates

the confidence and the ego or the way

you put it, the dopamine and the celebratory activities.

So no matter who you are, and this goes with yourself

as well, you do something, you have a success and you say,

Oh, that's great, but all glory is fleeting,

and I need to get back to work.

And look, and do people go too far with that?

Sometimes yes, absolutely.

Sometimes people, they don't stop and celebrate at all.

And those are the kind of people I think that get burned out

eventually because they never say, hey, that was awesome.

We had a big win.

Cool, high five.

They don't even say that.

So I think as a leader, as a friend,

as a parent, as a spouse, you want

to be able to modulate that, help modulate that,

don't shut it down.

Your kid walks off the wrestling mat for a high five

and you say, you could have won by more.

No, I'm not talking about that, or your kid walks off the mat

after losing, you say, you got what you deserve.

No you've got to be the counterweight to the emotions

that other people have.

And I think that when you're doing a good job as a leader,

as a friend, as a spouse or whatever,

you're doing a good job as a counterweight.

I think that's a good way to look at it.

You want to provide some balance for people

to make sure that they don't get out of control.

And you notice when people have a downfall,

it's normally because they've surrounded themselves

with people that there's no counter to,

there's no counterbalance.

If you were my best friend and I went out drinking last night

and had a great time and partied all night and met a girl

and you're like, heck, yeah, let's do it again tonight,

eventually, where are we going to be?

We're going to be in the gutter somewhere.

But if you say, hey, that was awesome, but remember we

got school on Monday, and you kind of pull me back,

we got to find balance in life and ourselves,

and then we got as much as we can provide balance

for other people because people are emotional

and they get caught up in what they're doing

and you want to keep people balanced.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: I think one of the reasons people

are really drawn to your message,

and I put myself in that category,

and I remember 2014 was a very different picture for me,

it doesn't really matter what the contour was,

things were working, but they weren't working

the way I wanted them to.

And I remember arriving at your content

first through the Tim Ferriss podcast

and then eventually the Jocko Willink podcast,

Joe Rogan podcast, those were the big two ones

that kind of like introduced me to you and your content,

and it was really a case of at the time,

I didn't have a lot of friends that

were doing similar things to me or that

matched my daily routines in a way

that I could kind of synergize with in this way.

I think one reason why you are so helpful to people

is that not everybody has these friends.

You can have the friend that's like, let's go out

and tie one on again, a lot of people

don't even have that friend, or they have a friend,

but they're not really close with that person.

There's some ideas nowadays about 80% of males

don't have a close friend that they could call.

I don't know, I mean, I'm guessing girls

and women feel the same too that a lot of stuff is superficial,

and there's a lot of communication

but not a lot of connection.

And so I think that you and a few other people in the--

let's call it social media public facing space,

serve as archetypes of the friend that's

going to tell you when you're up, great, but let's

clamp it after a while, or that when you're down,

let's get going and here's how you get going.

And so I do want to highlight that because I think

it's really important and it's but one reason why people are

drawn to your message and the message of some other people

who are out there trying to do similar things,

but you in particular because yes, you

have this military background, very

intense military background, wartime background,

but also you bring it into the daily routines that

certainly apply to everybody.

Most everybody can access non-heated water,

one would hope.

There's another dimension to this

that I want to just bring up and get your reflections on as it

relates to military, work, school, relationship, family,

et cetera, which is somewhat counterintuitive idea but then

once you hear it, it makes perfect sense,

which is that even though the catecholamines are

responsible for drive, and that that's what we're really

about when we're forward center of mass

and we have to control the intensity of the candle

and the level of the oil, I don't know what those actually

mapped to exactly.

We could probably figure it out if we really parsed it,

but that's the idea here, the analogy.

In a kind of surprising way, we know

that for sure one way to restore levels of motivation drive

enthusiasm, and to some degree confidence that things

could be different is through deep rest, things like sleep.

When things are really, really hard,

when kids are just like they were like falling apart,

it's like you put them to sleep, they wake up

and they're like delightful, they're

running around their pajamas when they're little,

and a teenager wakes up after a good night's sleep,

they might be a little like surly, but we're back.

Adults are like this.

The world is falling apart.

You go to sleep, wake up, OK, I might be able to manage

this kind of mindset.

So sleep.

And then the other one is we know

that play, the kind of physical activity or mental activity

where it might be a little competitive,

but the stakes are low, and it's really more about connection

with the activity or connection with somebody else.

Like we're going to play a game of whatever,

I won't play chess with Lex because he'll kick my ass,

I won't do jiu-jitsu with either of you

because you'll beat me up both of you, kindly,

but you'll do it.

But if we were to play a game, it's just us yeah,

we might be a little competitive,

but the stakes are low.

We know that play and social connection and sleep

are basically the reservoir or the location

that you go to refill the oil in the candle every single time.

And so for you, where do those things play into your routine?

You mention you can go hard all day and then in the evening,

is it dinner with family, typically if you're at home,

and what does that look like?

I know we're kind of parsing in--

I don't want to carve into your personal life too deeply,

obviously, there are boundaries there,

but what does that look like?

Is it everyone at the table, phones away,

and you're talking about the day?

Or is it-- yeah, share with us a little bit

of what that looks like because I think

it is an important contour to what you're about

and what we're talking about that most people just

don't have a window into.

JOCKO WILLINK: Yeah, so, well, first of all,

I mean, just the refilling the tank with games, I mean,

that's what jiu-jitsu is.

You're going to go and you're going

to have social connection with people,

you're going to talk to people that you know,

you're going to joke about whatever,

then you're going to roll.

You're going to have a good time rolling,

you're going to get a little sweat on,

you're going to feel good, then you're going to high five

like there's huge--

that's there, and your brain is kind of off.

When you're training jiu-jitsu at a certain level,

you're not going to be thinking anymore.

Same thing with surfing.

You go surfing and you catch a wave.

I mean, you're not thinking about, oh, I

need to put my balance over here.

No, it's happening and you're having a good time.

So I would say that restoration for me comes from those two

things for sure.

And then yeah, I mean, my wife and my kids when I get home--

and my kids are older now, and they're out of the house except

for one.

And when I was in the Navy when they were young,

I wasn't around at all.

We would rarely have dinner together because I was gone,

coming home late, you're working all the time,

you can never get all your work done, I'm training jiu-jitsu,

we rarely ate dinner as a family when I was in the Teams.

And now when I'm home, we can eat together for sure.

My daughter that's still at home,

she's going to-- we sit out there and eat dinner and talk

about just normal things that people talk about,

like how to conduct a night ambush or--

let's talk about normal daily things and what's going on.

And my daughter, she's 13 right now

and she talks to me about all kinds of stuff,

and it's awesome.

Yeah, I'm definitely enjoying that aspect

of being around more than I was when I was in the Teams

and we didn't have dinner.

Didn't happen.

So I would take my kids to jiu-jitsu,

I taught jiu-jitsu classes when I could

when I was in the Teams, would do workouts with them

in the morning if I had time on the weekends for sure,

stuff like that with my kids, that's kind of what I did.

But now yeah, we--

my wife is awesome, and she is a great cook now

because when we first got married, it was questionable.

I just was harassing her about this the other day.

She's an unbelievable cook now, and it's awesome.

And when we first met, by her own admission,

she will tell you she was not.

She's from England, and so they're just

not cooking what we're liking.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: No, the food over there,

at least when I was growing up in the few times I made it

over there, the food was pretty dreadful.

I mean, there were some exceptions to that,

and they drank a lot over there.

So I've been to some scientific meetings over there

where they would start with like Sherri in the afternoon,

and then beer after work.

It was outrageous.

I mean, the amount of alcohol intake was just absurd.

JOCKO WILLINK: Yeah.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: Sorry, Brits.

And again I'm not trying to--

I did an episode on alcohol, a lot of people

were angry about that episode because it's basically said,

once you get past two drinks a week,

you're starting to head into territory

that can deplete your health, so you

got to do a lot of other things to offset it.

But they drink a lot.

JOCKO WILLINK: Yeah, the Brits drink a lot.

I have spent time over there with my father-in-law,

my brother-in-law, and we definitely drank a lot.

So I'm glad I don't live there and had to drink with them.

I'm glad I don't have to drink with them all the time.

I'd probably be dead.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: You were straight edge growing up,

right?

JOCKO WILLINK: Yeah, I mean, when I was a kid,

and then when I joined the Navy, I started drinking.

That's like part of the culture that I bought into.

And I wanted to be a good SEAL, and I'm

looking around at the guys that were considered good SEALs,

oh, so we're drinking?

OK, that's what we're doing.

And that's what I did.

Looking back now, I didn't really--

I didn't think of it as a big deal at the time.

I wasn't like-- well, first of all, even when I was growing up

and I didn't drink and didn't smoke, didn't do drugs,

I wasn't like a guy putting an X on my hand, although my friends

and I, we all didn't drink, didn't smoke.

So we definitely-- look, I was listening to Minor Threat

when I was a kid.

I mean, I get it, but I wasn't I running

around telling everyone I was straight edge,

but I was on that path for sure.

And then when I got in the SEAL Teams, it's like, OK,

this is a different culture.

I'm not used to it.

And I didn't really even understand what drinking was.

I mean, I never had been drunk.

So got on the SEAL Team so I was like, OK, well,

once I turned 21, hey, these guys were going to have fun,

and I kind of just, OK, that's what we're doing,

and then I drank a ton while I was in the SEAL Teams.

And then as I retired from the SEAL Teams and went out,

we basically went to every bar that we would normally

go to like as SEALs.

I think we closed out the night at the Park Shores in OB.

And when I went home that morning,

I woke up the next morning, worked out,

and then I just kind of stopped drinking because--

and now I just definitely, I mean,

now I just don't really drink anymore.

So that's that.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah, when I had

my lab in San Diego for five years,

that's where my lab started, I definitely

saw a lot of Team guys in bars.

You guys would come in and take over bars.

These were little takeovers.

JOCKO WILLINK: Yeah.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: I wouldn't leave

because I wouldn't like give them the satisfaction

or me the dissatisfaction, but it was a little frustrating.

You're in there, you're having a decent time

and then just this enormous pack of Team guys

comes in and sort of like, all right,

maybe it's time to close out the night.

I was friends with enough of them,

but if you're not really a part of it,

you're not really a part of it, and I always

knew that and understood that.

One thing that I think really comes through now especially

but throughout our discussion and all the things

I've seen of you, and it gets me back

to this thing that came up at the beginning,

I'd really like to return to is that you

seem to have a very strong sense of context and self.

I'll just say it, I'm not a psychologist,

I'm not here to play one, but what you just

described was that in one context,

you know it made sense to be straight edge,

and you mentioned Minor Threat, great band, straight edge band,

but when it came time to run around with your friends then

and it made sense to be without alcohol or drugs or anything

at that stage and then you get into another context,

it's like OK, I can do this.

I can drink and still perform well and do

all the things I need to do.

And then when that closes out, I'm going to do something else.

And some people are like that because they're

kind of a chameleon.

They're switching themselves depending on the context,

and they're kind of getting accents

when they're in one location or another,

but that's not you at all.

I can tell with certainty that's not you at all.

There seems to be a very strong sense of self

so that when we have a sense of self that's firm,

we can go into different contexts.

We can even change our behavior, but we

don't lose who we are, which means

we can always return to it.

The image in my mind is like I've

done a little bit of scuba diving, not a lot,

but during some of the more advanced training for us,

this wasn't SEAL training, of course,

was following a line in the dark, like a night dive.

And you're following a line, and sometimes you're

navigating with tools, but suddenly you're

following a line underwater.

And this idea that you can let go of that line,

but you have to remember where it is you can return to it.

And that's kind of how I imagine the sense of self

because in different contexts, most healthy people

modify themselves a little bit.

We act differently at a wedding or a funeral

than we do in class or out with our friends.

Of course, it's an important part

of being a functional human.

So it seems to me that from a pretty early stage,

you had a pretty good sense of self.

Now I don't know if you sit in your room

and meditate on who is Jocko Willink and touch

that central chord of self.

I'm guessing you don't.

But as I say this, I have to ask,

was there something in your upbringing, your parents

or was it just kind of how you always imagine yourself is

like, yeah, this is who I am.

No matter what happens around me, I kind of know who I am.

Even if I'm engaging in some of the behaviors

that I might not do in another context,

I know who I am because I actually

think that many people do not have a very firm sense of self,

or their sense of self is so rigid that they can only

operate in this narrow trench of one domain of life

and they end up very, very isolated.

So I'd love for you to share with us what your recollections

are like the first time you realized like, yeah, I'm

good in a bunch of different places.

I'm safe or I'm whatever, because I think this is also

relates to confidence.

JOCKO WILLINK: I'm glad you are giving me

the benefit of the doubt on going in the Teams

and being like, oh, hey, man, looks like guys are drinking

and I haven't really drank before,

and it seems like these guys are having a good time.

Let's go have a good time with these guys,

and that's kind of what I did right.

As far as, and I look at it now and unfortunately for me,

I look at alcohol now as just--

I've seen it destroy so many people

that I've now kind of look at it and go, man, I don't

think people should drink.

And look, I get it.

I'm kind of an example.

I used to drink and go out and have a good time,

and it wasn't that big of a deal.

It didn't negatively impact me in some dramatic way,

but I have so many friends that it is horrible for.

It is all but ruined their lives.

And it's totally legal, which is kind of bizarre.

So I think that figuring that out when I look back,

and the culture in the SEAL Teams was very--

there was very alcohol centric.

And part of that is because it's just like a fraternity is

alcohol centric, or a football team

is because you got a bunch of young dudes

that are going to drink and have a good time.

So it's just sort of a young dude kind of thing,

and unfortunately, it ends up ruining a lot of people's lives

and they make bad decisions and they do stupid things

and it's just not good.

And I think the culture is moving away from that

a little bit in the SEAL Teams.

My alcohol brief used to say, I used

to tell my guys if you go out, you get a DUI,

you get put in jail for a fight, you

get hurt because you're doing something drunk,

you just did Al Qaeda's job for them.

You just did al-Qaeda's job.

They want to take you off the battlefield,

and you just took yourself off the battlefield.

You can't go on deployment now.

And that would always hit guys.

And I think that that's the SEAL Teams

kind of leaning in that direction more,

realizing the negativity of alcohol.

I wish I would have realized that earlier.

I wish I would have been a better leader

and recognize that in an earlier stage,

and recognize that just because I was kind of getting away

with it, meaning I didn't wake up in the morning,

oh, man, I can't wait to quit.

I never really had that feeling.

I wish I would have realized that there's other guys that

do, and there's people that can operate and be functional

and it doesn't really impact their lives,

but there's a lot of people that don't.

And I don't think it's worth the dice roll to start drinking.

I just don't think it's worth the dice for what

do you get out of it?

So I think that overall that's why if--

when I think about alcohol, I just think about all the lives

that it's ruined, and I don't like it.

And I wish I would have done a better job of saying,

you know what, this is probably not good,

and we shouldn't do this.

And unfortunately I didn't, and I try and convey that message

as much as I can now.

And it did bring me back to my roots because when I was a kid,

it was like alcohol is weak, and you look at these guys,

they don't know what they're doing,

they're acting like idiots, I'm not going to be like that.

And so as I got older, once I got on the SEAL Teams,

I went back to that.

As far as where I became me, I just actually

have to give a lot of credit to the music that I grew up

listening to, and the attitude that we had back then listening

to hardcore music, being able to stand up

against what other people were saying which is what you're

doing when you're in that scene, and the whole DIY nature of it.

Hey, we can just do this ourselves.

We can just make this happen for ourselves.

We don't need anybody else.

We can do this.

And that hardcore attitude and sticking by your friends

and standing up and getting in fights

and that's what you're going to do, that's kind of my attitude.

And I got interviewed for a documentary

that they're making about Harley Flanagan and the Cro-mags,

and when I was a kid and actually through my whole life,

that music is the soundtrack to my life.

And so I always would have that music running in my head.

But to your question, I had something in me

that when I heard that music for the first time, I was like, OK,

here it is.

Here it is.

I hear the Beatles, I hear the Grateful Dead,

I hear the Rolling Stones, I hear whoever,

and you go, OK, that's fine.

But when I heard hardcore music for the first time,

when I heard the Cro-Mags, when I heard Agnostic Front, when

I heard the Bad Brains, I thought

that was just like it was part of me already.

And then it was the attitude, and again you

can listen to my podcast with Harley Flanagan,

the way I viewed Harley Flanagan, the way I

viewed the Cro-Mags was not the way they actually were.

I mean, Harley was doing drugs, I mean, horrible drugs.

He was on heroin, everything else,

but his image was like straight edge, kind of spiritual,

they had all that stuff going on and I thought, OK, well,

that's who they are.

But I didn't know, I'm like a kid living

in the woods in Connecticut, I'm just

glad to be hearing what I'm hearing.

He listened to the lyrics, listen

to the lyrics of Minor Threat, listen to the lyrics

and you go, OK, this stuff, I agree with this stuff.

And I just think that that kind of

set a datum in my head of being OK with being outside,

being OK with saying no, being OK with being a rebel,

being OK with not going along with what

everyone else is doing.

And that came that became very important when

I was in the military, and I looked

at what leadership might be telling me to do

and might think to myself, hey, that

doesn't seem like a good idea, and having

the wherewithal to say, hey, boss,

I'm not sure this is a good idea.

Not to be a jerk about it, but just

to say there might be a better way to get this done.

What do you think of this?

Or, hey boss can I ask you a question about that?

So I think if I had to trace it back having Black Flag My War

side too on my record player for like a year and a half

straight, that's going to leave a mark, man.

And I think it left a mark on me.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: I love what you just said, and when I say love,

I really mean it because as we both know

we share a common love for certain music,

in particular Minor Threat and some stuff from the punk rock

scene.

In particular for me, the Northeast punk rock scene,

the Bruisers, all borrowed from the Bruisers, and now people

know him as the lead singer for the Dropkick Murphys.

Before that was the Bruisers.

And we run the risk of going deep

down a rabbit hole of music that most people may or may not

be familiar with, although most people have

heard the dropkicks, but yeah, I'm right there with you.

I mean, I remember the first time

hearing Stiff Little Fingers or Rancid

and even Bouncing Souls for New Jersey--

not even Bouncing Souls.

Sorry.

Sorry.

Sorry, Brian and Greg.

No, the Bouncing Souls and going, yes, that's me.

That's it.

But as you said, it was already in you.

It's like a recognition, and I bring this up,

and I want to highlight it, not because we

share this, although I do find that to be an amazing kinship

that we felt right away, and it was like we probably riffed

for 25 hours just on that.

But it brings me back to this idea that--

certainly is not my idea.

Actually the first time I heard about it

was from Robert Greene who wrote the book

Mastery, and some important writings, what was it?

I think it was the--

I forget how many laws of power, but those books, Robert Green

Mastery is actually a book that I highly recommend.

People read because it talks about mentorship and finding

mentors and the fact that we're supposed to break up and move

on from mentors, and that mentors aren't always people

that we know or that know us, et cetera.

Amazing book, really.

But he was the first person I ever

heard describe this idea that if we think back long enough,

there's some seed moment, they were shopping for the pants,

it sounds like it was, but also music where you see something

and it's like, yes, that's me and I'm that.

And then that becomes a sort of soundtrack

or visual image or something for your life

that you carry forward with you.

The neuroscientist in me wants to say

that that is the first time that we really

tap into this dopamine system in a way that is unique to us,

because every child responds to food

with a little bit of dopamine when we're hungry, responds

to warmth when we're cold, responds to a warm dry diaper

after we just wet ourselves, which we all did.

I don't know maybe, Jocko, you change your own diapers.

[LAUGHTER]

But I'm guessing that someone changed your diaper

at one point, not an image path we need to go down.

But the idea is that we all have these universal sources

of having our needs met, going from discomfort

to comfort and back again, which is basically childhood.

But at some point, something comes along

that we really feel is unique to us,

and it may be the thing that everyone else likes,

maybe it's top 40 or whatever it is.

Maybe it's the shoe that everyone's

wearing that seems good.

But I do think that there are certain people who

are kind of 10 or 20 or maybe even 180 degrees off from what

everyone else likes and they're like, that thing

is what's really cool, and it's a felt thing.

And so along the lines of felt things as opposed to things

that everyone values, what are your sources of motivation.

And I'm going to guess that some of them are internal.

We could point ahead or we could point to heart.

Doesn't really matter, but like when

you think of sources of motivation,

do you have a palette of them that you can dip into?

Do you even feel the need to dip into them,

or is it really just all about action steps

throughout your day?

Or if I can even venture into somewhat harder stories

that I've heard you talk about, do

you sometimes think back, listen,

I'm going to do this because there are a bunch of guys that

are dead now that can't, and so I'm

going to do it because I can.

What are the paints on your motivation pallet, if you will?

JOCKO WILLINK: Well, you probably

heard me say that motivation isn't something

that I am going to count on because it's just

an emotion that's going to come and go,

and it's just like feeling happy.

You feel happy right now, maybe you

won't feel happy in 15 minutes.

You feel sad now, maybe you won't feel sad in 15 minutes.

You feel motivated right now, you might not

feel motivated in 15 minutes.

Therefore I can't rely on it.

So I'm not going to put any--

I'm not going to put any money on just

being motivated because it doesn't really matter to me.

So the daily actions that I take aren't from motivation,

they're just from discipline.

Like I said earlier, I'm not going

to get up and go through some big debate about,

well, do I really feel like doing this?

No, I don't feel like doing it, but doesn't matter,

so I'm just going to go do it.

Now if we start to look at a broader movement through life

and continuing to try and move forward and move on,

my buddy Seth died, and he was the Delta Platoon commander

in tasking a bruiser.

And he died in 2017, and it was in a parachute accident.

I mean, it's definitely unexpected,

and also he'd already been through multiple deployments,

was with me in the Battle of Ramadi,

he then went back into Sadr City and led a ton

of very dangerous operations.

And then he did other deployments,

and was kind of done with his deployments, kind of done.