367: Wake Up And Get Some Some Sleep. Doc Kirk Parsley

Doc Parsley's Sleep Remedy: http://www.docparsley.com/jocko After serving with the SEALs, Doc entered medical school at the Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences (USUHS) in Bethesda. Doc graduated in 2004, 1 year after the birth of his third child. He interned in Obstetrics and Gynecology at Balboa Naval Hospital San Diego in 2005 and subsequently completed a Navy residency in Hyperbarics and Diving Medicine in 2006. From 2009 to 2013, Doc served as an Undersea Medical Officer at Naval Special Warfare Group One. While there, he led the development of and supervised the group’s first Sports Medicine Rehabilitation center. Doc saw firsthand the effect that low sleep and high stress had on the young SEALs who were under his care, men who he realized looked a whole lot like himself just a few years before. It was during this time that he began to develop the all-natural Sleep Remedy that is now the supplement of choice for Navy SEALs, pro athletes, C-level executives, and thousands of others. Henry, now Sleep Remedy's CFO, was one of the first to experience the life altering impact of Sleep Remedy. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Jocko Willink?

  This is Jocko Podcast number 367 with Echo Charles and me Jocko Willink. Good evening Echo. Good evening. I don't like going to the doctor. Okay. Just FYI. I don't like hospitals, actually. I always think that things are, they're just gonna heal up, right? The body's just gonna Wolverine and just heal up and they do, most of the time. Occasionally, they don't.

• 0:26Jocko Willink?

  One time I woke up in the morning, I couldn't move my right arm, but didn't move, which is not a good feeling. I was like, okay, well, it'll get better. It didn't. Uh, had to go to the doctor. Went to the doctor, got, you know, neck surgery. So unless something is really bad, I'm not going to the doctor.

• 0:48Jocko Willink?

  I don't know if that's leftover from basic SEAL training where they, you're avoiding medical at all costs because you don't want to get rolled or anything, but it stuck with me. Don't like the doctor. A little while after I had neck surgery, I would start randomly getting dizzy.

• 1:06Jocko Willink?

  Like, like dizzy, like I just spun around in circles. Sometimes I would get really dizzy. Sometimes I would be trying to walk and I would be bouncing into walls. So I'm talking legitimately busy. I was nauseous a lot.

• 1:24Jocko Willink?

  Almost, almost like a continual, almost all the time nauseous. And man, sometimes jujitsu, I would be doing jujitsu and I'd like roll or spin or something like that and it would just be the whole gym would just start spinning. Sometimes I would roll over in bed at night and the room would start spinning. It was then, you know, you're feeling sick. And I kind of learned to avoid some things, you know, in jujitsu, I'd try not to go inverted and stuff like this and in bed, I learned to roll, if I wanted to roll over in bed or even to roll to get out of bed, I would learn to do it very, very slowly and avoid head movement.

• 2:08Jocko Willink?

  And I thought it would go away. You know, I'm waiting for it to go away, waiting for Wolverine blood to flow and for the problem to stop and it didn't stop. So again, went to the hospital, went to the doctor and they did all kinds of tests on me, MRI tests and blood tests and they ear, nose and throat, spine. And they just did, they looked at everything and they didn't have an answer for me. And so I'm just dealing with it, just BTFing, just dealing with it. And it definitely sucked. And then like, so fast forward a year or something like that, I'm actually starting my retirement processing and I'm starting my retirement physical, you gotta get a physical before you retire. And I'm talking to the doc for the West Coast SEALs.

• 2:53Jocko Willink?

  And what's cool about this particular doc is he was a SEAL himself who had gone to the military medical school and become a doctor. So, you know, we knew each other. And he's getting, you know, we're hanging out and then he's giving me sort of the standard retirement physical questions about my health and I'm giving him the standard retirement answers, which is fine. Yep, fine. Yep, that's fine. And you know, we're just kind of shooting, shooting the breeze a little bit. He goes, anything else? You know, did I miss anything? And I said, well, you know,

• 3:27Jocko Willink?

  no one's been able to help me, but I'll throw it out there. I said, yeah, man, for the last like year, year and a half,

• 3:34Jocko Willink?

  I've randomly gotten just really dizzy sometimes. And sometimes it lasts for a long time and it kind of never goes away. I'm always in like a constant state of that. And he's like, kind of tilts his head a little bit, looked at me and kind of thumbing through my record he's seen now that he's looking at his scenes, a bunch of tests that I've been through and everything like this.

• 3:55Jocko Willink?

  And he says, you know, I think I might know what this might be. And he literally like turns to his computer, and this is 2010, but, or maybe it was 2009, something like that. Cause I retired in 2010, but it was some, it was like around that time. But he turns his computer and he Googles some stuff. And he's like, here, here, look at this. And he says benign positional vertigo. He goes, we gotta do these little exercises. And I'm like, okay, I mean, I don't know what he's talking about, right? Benign positional vertigo. I don't know what this means. And then he like says, okay, lay down, put your head over here, turn it backwards, turn over, sit back up again.

• 4:37Jocko Willink?

  And he goes, does like three or four times, does these exercises and then like says, all right, stand up.

• 4:44Jocko Willink?

  And he looks at me and he goes, how's that? And I'm like, doing a self-assessment and I'm like, dude, it's gone. I'm good. Like literally in two minutes, more than a year of dizziness and constant tests and exams. And this thing is gone in two minutes. That SEAL doc gave me my balance back. And it was pretty freaking awesome. And this particular doc has helped countless other SEALs overcome countless health challenges of all kinds.

• 5:24Jocko Willink?

  His name is Kirk Parsley and it's an honor to have him with us here today to talk about what he learned in his life, in the teams and taking care of team guys. So Doc, thanks for coming by, man.

• 5:42Speaker 01

  Hey, man. Thanks for having me.

• 5:43Jocko Willink?

  Do you remember that? I mean, I know you see like eight million people, so.

• 5:46Speaker 01

  I remember very clearly. Yeah. The Eplu maneuver.

• 5:50Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, but you, you, you weren't like sure about it when you said it to me. You were sort of like looking, you kind of, it was like, it seemed as if you had heard a rumor about something that it could have been and you kind of like halfway remembered it. And then you kind of Googled it.

• 6:05Speaker 01

  I could remember, I could remember the name of the test that you do to test people for that, right?

• 6:11Speaker 01

  And I was like, and I'm blanking on now. It's like Pike's Hall or something like this. And I was like, hmm. And you look for the nystagmas, right? The shaking of the eyes and something you do to like hospital patients and and so I knew that part and I was like, I know. So there's a little stone in one of your semicircular canals and it's blocking that. And so the fluid's not flowing and it's the same as seasickness or something, right? At that point. And so I remember. Uh, I remember, well, there's, there's a way to tilt, there's a way to tilt this out. And I couldn't remember if there's like a certain pattern because you have three canals and they're all at different angles. So that's why you like turn your head at all these different angles so many times. And I was like, I know there, I know there's something to like do this and uh, you know, medicine's full of um, what called eponyms like,

• 6:55Speaker 01

  you know, shit's just named after people, right? So what is Epley maneuver? It's not descriptive at all. So I don't know what the hell that means. Somebody's name and there's maneuver there, right? And I'm like, there's some kind of thing. And so that's what I Googled, like, uh, you know, clearing, oh, uh, yeah. And, and so it's, it's just like clearing the stones that are in the semicircular canal. And I think I'm looking for that video and like, oh, here's how we do it. So I remember like leaning the table back down and going, duh, duh, duh, right? Uh, cause like we, like we knew each other, we didn't know each other super well at that point. Uh, but you had your fucking BTF, uh, you know, uh, reputation. I don't know if I ever told you, did, did you ever hear about the bracelets?

• 7:40Speaker 01

  No. At our clinic, right? So we, at the rehab clinic, you know, Jason trained all these guys. And, uh, you know, it, it's hard to bounce back from surgeries a lot of time, right? And people aren't all that motivated because they're just, they're used to like this performance. I mean, I'm supposed to be up here and like, they're barely, like they're barely performing like a grade school kid or something. Um, and so there's always a motivation component. And, uh, so he had these tests for people to like, you know, try, try to get to this level, try to get to that level. Try to, and it's like these progressive steps. And so, and then there was some sort of reward involved in it. And that's, that's how we ended up, you know, doing Sears Tower with Elliot and all that stuff.

• 8:24Speaker 01

  Like that was part of the reward kind of pathway. And, uh, one thing we, so this is heretic and I hope your audience doesn't hate me for saying this, but, um, the WWJD, what would Jesus do bracelet? We heard like a hundred of those and we gave them, they were what would Jocko do?

• 8:41Speaker 01

  And we had like this running list on the wall of like, uh, Chuck Norris kind of thing about Jaco. My contribution was Jaco sleeps with a pillow under his gun.

• 8:56Speaker 01

  So anyways, yeah, so you had a reputation and I knew your and I remember doing all that and going, I hope this works.

• 9:05Speaker 01

  And yeah, and then we, you know, as we got to know each other more of the years, I know you had to do that. Do you still have to do it?

• 9:13Jocko Willink?

  I probably have to do it once a year. And it, but it's, it's just such a non-factor now. I go, oh, there it is. I'm a little dizzy, boom, but I just do it. And man, it's, I was like that for a year and a half and it was gnarly, gnarly. I remember I was doing, I was training a guy for a fight, an MMA fight. And he was like ground and pound, like we had gloves on, like we're going at it and all of a sudden, like I did something where I did a quick head movement and all of a sudden I got super, like, like more, even more dizzy than normal. And I'm standing there and like laying on my back and he's in my guard. He's punching me in the head. And I look at the clock and the clock, there's like, this was, this was Thomas, remember Thomas?

• 9:56Speaker 01

  Dervahl?

• 9:57Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, Dervahl. I mean, he's this freaking Polish warrior.

• 10:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:02Jocko Willink?

  And he's punching me in the head and there's like 20 seconds left and I'm just like, please let this stop. And I, I got up and walked and I, I like was doing a drunk walk out, you know, all unstable. And he, he was kind of like looking at me as if he had hit me too hard or something. It's just like, no, I'm leaving now.

• 10:23Jocko Willink?

  That and when the-

• 10:24Speaker 01

  Good thing you have thick skull.

• 10:27Jocko Willink?

  From that guy for sure. He's a beast. Yeah, I had a, actually that's when, that's when Yon, the, the champ. Not currently, but hopefully coming back for it. Just part with that maniac dude. That's not a good way to be healthy.

• 10:46Jocko Willink?

  Uh, yeah. And then I had the, I don't know if you remember this, I, I go, I was training jiu jitsu. Uh, I didn't, I did a, no, Dean did a, a bicep slice on me and like my bicep like popped and moved and I was like, God.

• 11:03Speaker 01

  You got a partial tear, I remember.

• 11:04Jocko Willink?

  And he, and so I go in, I see Jason, I see doc.

• 11:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:07Jocko Willink?

  And they're like, yep, hey, we can get you scheduled for surgery right now, you know, like, and I go, cool, like, sign me up, let's rock and roll. And then they go, okay, yep, we got you signed up, your, your surgery is going to be in four weeks or something like this, three weeks or something like this. And they go, come in on this day for your pre-surgery check. I go, cool. And so I go in, I'm like, Jason, you have here for my pre-check and he goes, he starts looking at me all weird and stuff like I'm not normal. And he's like, hey, doc, can you come and they come and look at me and they're like, you're healed.

• 11:38Jocko Willink?

  And I was like, yes.

• 11:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:40Jocko Willink?

  It's vax, you see?

• 11:43Speaker 01

  I, I, I remember, I remember that, like, there, there's still being like some sort of defect in that. And, uh, and we, I remember we told you like, well, it still might rip, right? With what you do, because like if you're resisting an arm bar or something, like, you know, you're doing pull-ups, whatever, maybe it might still rip. And, uh, and you're like, what happens if it rips? We're like, well, then you do this surgery, like, same surgery, pretty much. You're like, I'll just see if it rips.

• 12:12Jocko Willink?

  You just went on about your life and I guess it never ripped.

• 12:15Speaker 01

  I was gonna ask you about that.

• 12:16Jocko Willink?

  Now, now Echo over here, he's had one on each arm. He's done that, he's needed that surgery twice. Did I call you when you, when that happened to me? Was I like, hey, what's up?

• 12:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, so that's funny, you don't remember, because I was, I'm glad you're here to kind of confirm that, because I didn't believe, I was like, probably it wasn't ripped. You can't, it's not just going to heal like that, like it wasn't ripped, like the doc made a mistake or whatever. And you're like, no, no, no, I'm like Wolverine. I was like, all right, that sounds good, that does sound cool, but it didn't rip or whatever. And he was like, whatever. It was like an argument.

• 12:48Jocko Willink?

  So do you accept now?

• 12:49Speaker 02

  I do accept, yeah, thanks for confirming that.

• 12:52Jocko Willink?

  All right, enough about that. Uh, let's get into you, let's start at the beginning. So where, where, where were you born? Where, where were you born? Where'd you grow up?

• 13:00Speaker 01

  I was, I was born in sort of a. Sub area of Houston, Spring, uh, Spring, Texas or Spring, Spring Branch, actually. So Spring Branch Hospital in Houston, outside of Houston. And then is that where you spent your, your youth? Yeah, uh, pretty much. So by today's standards, definitely because Katie, where I'd spent like the second, second half of my childhood was in Katie.

• 13:25Speaker 01

  That was like forty five minutes outside of Houston then. And now it's just like part of Houston and like all the sprawl. Like you, you literally drove through like cow pastures and rice fields for forty five minutes. And then there was this one road and you took that one road for like three or four miles and then you ran into the neighborhoods of Katie. And, uh, last time I went there, there's no break from downtown Houston to that. It's like all concrete jungle, like shopping centers.

• 13:56Speaker 01

  I couldn't even find the house I grew up in. You think it's still there or no? It's still there. Okay. But like all the landmarks I knew to look for, and they've renamed some streets and stuff. And so, uh, you know, when you get off the freeway now, there's streets immediately. Well, there was nothing like except for three or four miles. There was just pastures where we rode in motorcycles and played football and whatever. Even went hunting and like, and that was all, you know, on whatever farmland and untouched thicket. And it was just like buildings and shopping centers and streets. And I'm like, I, like, I don't really know how far down to go. And I was looking for the main kind of street that went through my neighborhood.

• 14:35Speaker 01

  And, uh, I think they've renamed that street and cause they've connected it and it's much longer now. And, and so I couldn't figure out where to turn left till I go into the neighborhood. So small town in Texas. Yeah. How come you don't have a Texas accent? I do when I get really tired. It's got, it's kind of coming back more. I deliberately got rid of it. How come?

• 15:01Speaker 01

  Just to avoid being chastised for, you know, like being in the military and people, people screw with you about, because I listen to country music and I drove a truck and, you know, and like, Red Nate, you have a, you know, uh,

• 15:18Speaker 01

  Chris, my, you know, like my, the good friend of mine from the SEAL teams, he, you know, he's from essentially Detroit, right? And, He don't like, damn, Texas, go get me some chili. Like, and everybody just rode me all the time. So I didn't have a super thick accent, but you know, I I purposely got rid of it. Now that I'm back in Texas and everybody talks like I used to talk and It's coming back. It comes back and and if I get really tired, I think my like, that's my real like, I think it's a it's an it's an unconscious effort now to not do that and not, I've let the colloquialisms come back. Like now I'm fixing to do something. I wouldn't do that.

• 15:59Speaker 01

  And I say y'all instead you guys. And I've always thought that was more appropriate because of like, that's a contraction for you all. And guys, this is a gendered word. So it doesn't make any sense. Call a bunch of girls, hey, you guys, hey, y'all, right? So, yeah, it it it kind it kind of comes and goes.

• 16:18Speaker 01

  What'd your what'd your parents do?

• 16:21Speaker 01

  Well, my father split. That was what he did. So like, I was like six weeks old or something.

• 16:29Speaker 01

  And so I actually met him at my wedding. When I was 25. So what'd your mama do? My mom, so the so the first half of my childhood,

• 16:42Speaker 01

  we were poor trailer park trash, you know, and but my mom, my mom actually had to drop out of high school to raise her younger sisters because her parents ran off, you know, and so my mom had us when we were super young, like me and my sister, she had like 18, 19 years old. And so she, you know, she got married right out of high school essentially. And so she went to, she was going to college and working as like a cocktail waitress or something like when I was young. And then when she remarried, just when we moved to Katy, and she married a, who's a cop at the time, and he he went on to do

• 17:26Speaker 01

  other things. But she started working for Delta Airlines and was like a reservationist and then became a flight attendant. And then she retired from that and worked for Southwest as a flight attendant for a while. And now she's in her 70s and she just retired like a couple of years ago from Southwest. She's been getting after it. She's a hard, she's a hard, like, Irish redhead, like, feisty, wiry, strappy, strong woman, you know? And so.

• 17:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, and and she divorced that stepfather when I was like sixteen. He's a super, super abusive to everybody, but especially me. And so. So how did you react to that?

• 18:10Speaker 01

  It was a big insult to me because I was the man of the house until that, right? So like, I was like eight, I was up up till like eight years old. She got married when I was like eight or nine. And I grew up with all women. So it's my mom, her mom, her sisters, and my sister. And at five years old, they'd be like, Kirk, I think I heard something. Good luck, right? Okay, get my red Ryder BB gun and like go and look in, look in the living room, see if anybody's there. Literally sent me out in the front yard to kill a water moxen with a BB gun. And thank God, like, like a man was driving by and saw this shit show about to happen. Like, I'm gonna go save this little boy. And so he came out like,

• 18:53Speaker 01

  you know, and I taught me how to, you know, I stepped on the snake's head and cut its head off with his help and all that and whatever. So,

• 19:01Speaker 01

  so I was really blown away by the fact that. Some other dude showed up? Some dude's gonna like hurt my mother, hurt my sister, right? And so I'd always like try to get involved. And then he'd turn on me. And so that was my strategy for a while. But he's an evil

• 19:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so he, he figured out, well, it's worse if I don't turn on Kirk, right? Just let me keep trying to interject and just ignore me and keep hurting my mom or whatever. So,

• 19:35Speaker 01

  so I grew very fucking angry, very angry. And I wanted to kill him and I fully planned on it. And, you know, my mom, I asked my mom pour a weight set for Christmas when I was eight.

• 19:54Speaker 01

  Pumping iron had come out, I'd seen Arnold. Yeah. And I was like, yeah, I'm gonna get those muscles, I'm gonna crush that motherfucker. And, uh, and I knew my dad was a big dude and kind of a badass and, and they knew each other.

• 20:09Speaker 01

  Grew up kind of in the same town and, uh, so I think I was a threat to him, right? That I was my potential father. Uh, and so his biggest fear was that I was gonna grow to be better than him, bigger, better, faster, stronger, whatever. And all of his fears came true. But, uh, at sixteen, I had, uh... So did you get the weight set at eight? I got the weight set at eight. You started Jack and Steel? He came into me, he came into my room, he's like, "Heard you wanna weight set? You wanna weight set, where you wanna be one of those faggots?" And I'm like,

• 20:46Speaker 01

  "I'm sorry, excuse me?" And he's telling me, "Well, bodybuilders are all gay and that's why they like shave their bodies and bury around other men and all this other stuff." And I'm like, "Hmm, I don't think so, whatever, I still want the weight." So I didn't know what to do with him. I got like the little bar with the concrete weights. Oh, yeah. And I was grounded my whole life, the whole time I was with him, right? So if I got a bad report card, I got grounded till the next report card. And then grounded to the next, and then the last report card of the year, I was grounded six weeks into the summer, cause that's when another report card would get. So I'd had like eight weeks of summer, like that was the only time I had any kind of social life. So I sat in my room a lot, got grounded in my room a lot. And I'd sit and like, all I knew how to do was overhead press. That's like, that's what you think of is, and I'd just sit there and like overhead press from front and back,

• 21:31Speaker 01

  from back, front, and then, uh, and curl. And that's all I did. And I'd just sit in my room for hours and just lift weights. Um, and then, you know, every time I tried to take any kind of martial arts, he did everything he could to thwart that. And, uh, so I'd like, I'd get in something and he'd just make it impossible for me to stick with it and all that. So, um, I, I was really, really angry and that, the only reason I think I was good at football is cause I was so damn angry. And, and I, and I was a big, fast, strong kid. Um, and I just, I just literally wanted to hurt everybody I could. Like it was a way for me to hurt people and not get in trouble. Cause like getting in fights, you got, you always got in trouble for the fights or most of the time.

• 22:15Speaker 01

  How old were you when you started playing football?

• 22:19Speaker 01

  Actually, I started in kindergarten.

• 22:22Speaker 01

  I played, we lived on this island in the Ship Channel. That's where our trailer was and it's Kima, Texas is the name of it. And it was just now it's like a kind of a ritzy tourist area. But it was just like this little blue collar crappy, did a bunch of shrimp boats and stuff. And so we, I lived there.

• 22:42Speaker 01

  Literally my sister and I as a year old and I, we walked to school, crossed these railroad tracks. And I remember walking to football practice, walking home from a football game, like me and my pads, her in her cheerleader outfit and we're like walking like probably two miles to like our school, going across these major roads, whatever. It's like parenting was a totally different bag back then, right? But my mom was like I said, she was surviving. She's like going to school at night and, or going to school in the day, working at night. And then her sisters were just kids too, right? Like her sisters are raisins, but they're 15, like was a 15 year old now. And like sometimes the 15 year old gets in the car when the car runs and drives this around and whatever. So it was, it was a pretty sketchy scene. And then, you know, in Texas you can start playing.

• 23:25Speaker 01

  So I played what we called dad's club, pop Warner out here, right? I played that and then in Texas you can start playing for your school in junior high. Okay. And I had the head coach of, in junior high was a former marine. And he took, he took a liking to me and so I, I did well in junior high football and then transferred to the really, a really good football team. My, our high school, there are two high schools and, and Katie. The one I went to was the newer one and it'd only been open a couple of years when I started it. But we were going to, we had a great coaching staff and.

• 24:08Speaker 01

  And you know, and in Texas, like these dudes are making big money and like, and they, they got recruited out to Odessa my senior year, but, um, but really, really good coaching in that. And that's what led me into powerlifting is one of my, one of my coaches was a powerlifter and he, and I was, uh, I don't know if I was the strongest in like every lift, but I was, I was one of the strongest in everything and I was the strongest in several of the things. And so he was, he took a liking to me and, and he's like, I'm gonna teach you how to lift for real. Cause you're like, you're just in football lifting. And so he taught me like the below parallel squats, right? And I had to do it with a bar and had to do a hundred perfect reps before he'd let me put any weight on.

• 24:53Jocko Willink?

  Damn.

• 24:55Speaker 01

  And it took me like a month. He would sit down next to me and just watch and go, yeah, yeah. Nope. And he'd turn around, that was it for the day. If it was on the second rep, it was on the second rep. It was on the 98th rep. It was the 98th rep. And they're like, nope. And then.

• 25:09Jocko Willink?

  Did you, did you have the potential of playing in college?

• 25:14Speaker 01

  Um, I could have played. I don't, I don't think I would have, I wouldn't have excelled. I just wasn't big enough. I mean, I was, I was, uh, I actually grew a couple inches in the Navy. Uh, so I, when, when I enlisted at 17, I was, um, 5'11". I grew like to 6'1" somewhere in the first couple of years. I don't know.

• 25:36Jocko Willink?

  Did you, uh, how did you hear about the Navy?

• 25:41Jocko Willink?

  Well, and did you, and did you know about the teams?

• 25:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. So that's a funny story. So, um, the recruiter, we had a recruiting office in, in Katy and, uh, the recruiter, the marine recruiter was, was a boxer and, and my last year of high school, I lived alone. I lived in an apartment with, actually with a guy who runs the gym. So I split an apartment, but, and I worked, I worked at a gym as, as like the assistant manager of this gym and, uh,

• 26:17Speaker 01

  And anyway, and I would box with this marine recruiter and you know, heartbreak ridge had already been out. So it's like forest recon, you know, and, and I, you know, and I love, like, I've always loved the water. Like, I've always been like, as I was a lifeguard and we were always like, uh, doing water sports and going to the beach whenever we could and all that stuff. Um, working on breath holds just because it was cool. In fact, like, I would go in a pool and just be so upset that I had to come up, right? Cause I like, I'd sit on the bottom of the pool. Like, I just want to stay here for like, and you know, now sort of I know more the physiology of like, what I was now like a settling down my nervous system, honestly, and I was feeling really good in there. And, um, so, uh, yeah, so

• 26:56Speaker 01

  anyway, uh, then I started boxing with this marine recruiter and, uh,

• 27:05Speaker 01

  and this documentary came out, 48 hours. Uh, it's a news documentary show, like, it's like 60 minutes, but it's called 48 hours. And they followed a BUDS class, actually,

• 27:18Speaker 01

  Crimmens, you remember Crimmens? Yeah. So Crimmens was like the star of this. They're following a BUDS class. Okay. And they- Was he in the class? He was in the class. Like, he was, he was the guy, right? Like, he was the one, he was the guy who got all the camera attention. Cause he was like this salty old- Yeah, for sure. -fisherman from Boston or something, right? Uh, somewhere in New England. And, uh, and they kept saying, this is the toughest training in the world. This is the toughest. And what did I grow up doing? Like, with this abusive stepfather, I wanted to be the toughest. I wanted to be the biggest badass in the world, right? That's what I wanted. And so I would, I, I watched that thing, I recorded on VHS and I watched that thing like 20 times. And then I waited for the marine recruiter to be out of town. And I went over to the Navy and talked to him about being a SEAL.

• 28:03Speaker 01

  What, what year in high school were you? Well, it was my fourth year, but my fourth year, I was only a sophomore by credits. So is that because you just were failing everything? I, I started failing classes as soon as my mom got remarried and I got in that world, right? Like, when you have screaming, fighting and cops over at your house all the time, it's like, you know, and I'm grounded all the time at home and he's abusive and I'm always like hiding from, like, and it was just, I wasn't going to be doing homework and that, like, my sympathetic nervous system was ramped up to hell. Like, I'm, I'm in fight or flight kind of all the time being home. Uh, and so, yeah, I, I-

• 28:47Speaker 01

  I I whatever I I I was a screwed up. I was a super screwed up kid. But anyway, uh, so Bivens out of town. I went and talked to the Navy recruiter. And he's like, I've never put in a seal before. I don't know. I'll look into it. And that they just started the delayed entry program. So that started literally months before uh, I I signed up. So I told my mom what I want to do. And she was like, alright. So she signed off on it. She's like, cool. Off the payroll. Yeah. And, uh, yes. So anyway, yeah, I so from like third grade through four years of high school. I don't I'd never really legitimately passed any class unless a teacher like me. And, you know, then everybody starts telling you

• 29:31Speaker 01

  what a moron you are, and you're afraid of people finding out. So you're like, you know, I want to call any attention to my stupidity. So I'm just like being quiet and like, and so nobody like none of my friends knew that I was behind in high school. Like none of my, none of my friends knew that I wasn't going to graduate. I knew I wasn't going to graduate because I wasn't going to stick around for two or three more years to get through high school, obviously.

• 29:54Speaker 01

  And so when I joined, I was just like, you know, at some point I'm going to go get a GED and then and and then I took the ASAB and then actually did decent on that. And, uh, yeah, so I I joined.

• 30:10Speaker 01

  And I didn't tell, I still didn't tell the Marine recruiter. I was like afraid he was gonna be so pissed off at me.

• 30:17Speaker 01

  And then, uh, yeah, just like a month, we had all these street parties, you know, like vacant streets. He'd go go park our cars, turn the lights on, have keg parties and whatever.

• 30:30Speaker 01

  And it was always a mix of the high schools and there's always some friction because we're rivals, you know, in sports. And, uh, so about a month after I joined, about a month after my Marine recruiter found out that I joined, I think it was a couple of months after I joined.

• 30:51Speaker 01

  I I tried to break up a fight and this dude swung on me and like grazed me right like I had decent enough head movement to get out of the way, but he like grazed me. And I was such an angry rage ball and so arrogant.

• 31:07Speaker 01

  I was maximally offended that somebody tried to this. I'm like, who the fuck do you think you are? So I try and look at the guy just bewildered and I guess there's something in my eyes that made him realize and he took off running. And so I took off running after him and I freaking body slammed him down the street and punched him. And then one of his buddies comes and I start beating his ass and I beat up these two guys, right? And this one guy, he's curled up in the fetal position and I'm picking him up by his ears and telling him to fight. And he won't, now they spit in his face. Like I was angry, nasty dude. And uh, anyway, and so

• 31:42Speaker 01

  I pull up to see my marine recruiter, or to see the Navy recruiter, I pull up to recruiting offices a few days later and the marine recruiter comes out and he says, so what's this I hear about you beating up on my Marines? I'm like, huh?

• 31:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. So anyway, so I, I watched that thing over and over again, wanted to do toughest training in the world. Went and joined, I didn't know what a SEAL was.

• 32:07Speaker 01

  I didn't even, I didn't know what a SEAL was when I was in BUDS. I wanted to do the toughest training in the world. And, you know, I gradually learned more and more, but I still didn't know, like when, I don't know if they did it. Uh, when you went through, you were a couple of years after me, I think, right? Um, but we, they used to take us around to all the different SEAL teams and then you had to rank choice, like the team, and you had to rank choice to the east coast while I was also, also without visiting any of those. And I remember like when they started taking us around to the teams right before graduation. I remember it kind of hitting me that, oh, I don't actually know what this dude do. Oh, here's how, here's how naive I was. So you remember the delayed entry program gave people three chances of passing the test? Okay.

• 32:49Speaker 01

  Okay. So you could take the PRT and if you passed it, you were guaranteed to go to BUDS first. Cause remember the way it was before, you could pass the PRT, but then your gaining command had to, had to, had to agree to let you go to BUDS instead of coming to them, which almost never happened. Right. So you had to go to the fleet for a couple of years to come back. So the delayed entry program was all about if you pass the PRT, you definitely go and it gives you three chances to pass the PRT. And then you get like some sort of promotion out of bootcamp, promotion out of A school. And so, um, yeah, so I, I took the test and uh, I remember his name, I remember his name is Petty Officer Winkler. He was a first classed Vietnam Air SEAL. Like all Vietnam Air SEALs, super cool guy.

• 33:35Speaker 01

  And, uh, and so they had like a morning training for people who failed the test to go in and work on their swimming, work out, like whatever they weren't good at, go work out. So you had to get up a couple of hours earlier, an hour earlier and you could go and, and they excused you from a little bit of your time at the, in your regular bootcamp company, cause we didn't have our own stuff back then, as you know. And, uh, and so I, I just smoked the PRT and Winkler really liked me and he's like, hey, you should come in the mornings and you can coach guys. Cause obviously I'd worked at a gym and I was like sort of a personal trainer and stuff anyway. So I was doing that and then got to be really good

• 34:15Speaker 01

  friends with him and the other SEAL motivator. And after the, after I coached people in the mornings, I'd end up sitting in their office, shooting the shit. They'd, they'd be drinking coffee. I didn't drink coffee. And he said something about dive pay or hazard duty pay or something. And I was like, what's that? And he starts explaining it to me. And this light bulb goes off in my head. I'm like, I'm gonna get paid?

• 34:42Speaker 01

  And he thought that was the funniest damn thing he'd ever heard. So he took me around to every office like, tell them what you just said to me. And so I, and I literally, like I was just a dumb kid. Like I just wanted to go do this training. I didn't, I didn't know I was gonna get paid. Like, why, why aren't you gonna pay me? Cause right, I have, you give me a place to live, you give me clothes and then there's a chow hall like, what do I need money for? I figure like, I'm just gonna be training to kill people or going to kill people. And what else, what else am I gonna do? Why do I need money? I didn't think about people having families and kids. Like, you know, you just think like, oh, they're guys in the military. That's what he does. That's all he does.

• 35:19Jocko Willink?

  I had a similar, I was in my first platoon, I think it was my first platoon or whenever I got paid per diem for the first time. Like they had to explain it to me a couple of times, you know, you know, you're getting,

• 35:30Speaker 01

  that was a wild concept.

• 35:31Jocko Willink?

  Okay. You're going to the desert and here's $1,400. And I'm like, uh, what's this for? And they're like, for your food.

• 35:37Speaker 01

  And I only make a thousand bucks a month and you give me $1,400.

• 35:41Jocko Willink?

  So you're like, uh, wait, but I mean, I, what about when I'm not in the desert? I still gotta buy food there. Yeah. But when you're there, we're gonna give you money to buy your food. I'm like, okay, I'll take it. It took a while to comprehend that, the whole, the whole thing. When you got to BUDS, was there, was there any challenges for you at BUDS?

• 35:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, the runs. Uh, I, I was a,

• 36:03Jocko Willink?

  what did you weigh?

• 36:04Speaker 01

  230.

• 36:07Jocko Willink?

  And not, not, not a, not a fast runner?

• 36:11Speaker 01

  I was a great sprinter. You know, I was a fast twitch, that's a fast twitch dude. And, uh, and like when, when we did Frog Hill.

• 36:19Jocko Willink?

  Dude, I remember one time I was talking to you, you're like,

• 36:22Jocko Willink?

  I told you, you're like, oh, what you, wait, what? Yeah. I mean, you're deadlifting that. And I was like, dude, I can like, I deadlift, the most I've ever deadlifted is like 505 or something. And you looked at me like I was scum.

• 36:34Jocko Willink?

  I was like, damn, that hurt, bro.

• 36:38Jocko Willink?

  So yeah, you're all fast twitching. So the runs kicked your ass.

• 36:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. Um, I, I struggled and I knew I would cause I, I mean, I struggled in preparation. So when I first decided to join the Navy,

• 36:51Speaker 01

  the marine recruiter actually talked to a SEAL and had the, and had the guy talk to me. So I had a phone call with the guy. And, uh, and he said,

• 37:03Speaker 01

  Well, it sounds like your biggest problem is gonna be running cuz I all I done it like I ran track and field, but I did like I the furthest I the furthest I ever ran was 400 yards, 400 meters, right? Like that was the furthest I'd ever run in my life. I'd never done a mile on the track, right? Never. And so and I hated that, like in football and to be like, take a lap to warm up, right? I'm like, I'm smoked. Like, what do you mean, warm up? Like, I'm done. Like, come back from a lap. What are you kidding me? And unfortunately, my son inherited that from me. So this this seal told me, he's like, the biggest problem for you is gonna be the run.

• 37:44Speaker 01

  You need to be running like 10 miles a day. I'm like, I don't really. Okay, so I'm like, I don't know where I'm gonna run 10 miles. So I go out in the like, the main street that I told them one of the guys from the freeway down to my town that goes several miles the other way. So I clocked it off in my car and it's five miles. Michael, I'm just gonna run down to the end of this thing and back 10 miles a day. I didn't even have any shoes. I got I owned like one pair of shoes. They're like topsiders. And so I just ran barefoot down concrete streets. I just started running 10 miles a day. And I did it. I mean, I'm sure I didn't do it every day, but I like my memory is it's like I just did it every day. And and then when I got and I and then I started

• 38:29Speaker 01

  timing myself in the mile and a half cuz right, we had the PRT and I knew I had to hit a certain time. And that that I didn't agree it like I probably, I probably only beat that qualification time with 30 seconds, 20 seconds, something like that. Like when I and then when when I went to A school, I really focused on running a lot. And I did like a couple of 10 Ks. And I I got to where it's running like six and a half minute miles and tennis shoes and shorts on a road on the street, right? So I think the cutoff time in Bud's like seven and a half minutes or something in pants and boots on the sand. So it was, it was all I could do. Uh, I mean, I was always in the Goon Squad, always in the Goon Squad. Every run I was in the Goon Squad, but I was almost always the first guy out because it was like

• 39:14Speaker 01

  bear crawl races or sprints or like something like that. And like, hey, that's my bag, baby. In fact, you remember Frog Hill out of the island? Yep. It's like you had to do pull ups before the meal or you had to do Frog Hill. I was so fast at Frog Hill and I, and, and like anybody else, I'm going through Bud's scared to death that I'm getting kicked out. Every day. Every day, like every second. It's like they're about to figure out I'm, I shouldn't be here and I'm getting tossed, right? And so I, I just like a real, just keep your head down. Like the most humble time of my life was, was Bud's and I wasn't going to bring any attention to myself. And I don't think I really realized I did it. Uh, cause I think they had kind of groups or something and I,

• 39:54Speaker 01

  I mean, I just smoked everybody in my class. Like I, I think I was come, I was almost all the way back down before anybody got to the top. And so then there's this one instructor who decided I must be sandbagging the runs because look how good he is at running, right? So, so he just turned on me and like, you know, I was just beat down, boy. And then they got to where they were dropping me for pushups when they started the class and I still had to meet the time. And then after a while, I was like, you have to beat everybody or you're still going to the surf zone. So I had to, what was second phase, like 40 pushups or something? I don't know. I don't remember. I think, I think it's like 20, 40, 60 or something like that through the phases. And so whatever it was in second phase, I had to do the pushups and then I sprint and I would still win.

• 40:37Speaker 01

  And like, I was really good at that and I just sucked it at the run. And you'd barely pass the four mile time runs. Barely. I mean, every run was like five, four, freaking me diving across the finish line. Like, I mean, in fact, uh, one of the instructors, because I was, I was pretty good at everything else. Like some of the calisthenic stuff, like flutter kicks forever. Like I wouldn't like that. That's just too enduring for me. Like I couldn't, uh, but, but I was always like a, a,

• 41:09Speaker 01

  I'm pretty sure it's the biggest, but I was definitely like one of the top two.

• 41:13Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, two thirty is a big dude to be going through.

• 41:15Speaker 01

  Well, I finished BUDs at one eighty-five.

• 41:18Jocko Willink?

  Oh damn.

• 41:20Speaker 01

  And they.

• 41:20Jocko Willink?

  I started BUDs at one seventy-four. I graduated BUDs at one eighty-five.

• 41:24Speaker 01

  Holy.

• 41:24Jocko Willink?

  So you and I met in the middle.

• 41:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, I that I think they called me like the cyborg gorilla or something because like I lost all my muscle mass in my torso. But my arms didn't get smaller, so I looked like a big gorilla. Like I was just a weird looking thing. But you know, I could do like anybody like you graduate BUDs, I could do like six hundred pushups in a row, right? And I remember going to the gym the first time after BUDs. And I couldn't bench two plates. And I was literally.

• 41:56Jocko Willink?

  You were like.

• 41:57Speaker 01

  I I almost cried. Like I was sitting there like going, oh, God, like I had tears welling up in my eyes. I could, I could go outside and like, oh, my God, you know, because uh, I mean, I wasn't super strong, but I was, I mean, definitely like well into the three hundreds in high school. Right? So I expected to be stronger and I'm like, I can't bench my body weight. I'm weak. Uh, but yeah, obviously it comes back pretty fast. So, yeah.

• 42:23Jocko Willink?

  Do you, do you remember when they started talking about medium twitch muscle? Do you remember the timeframe that that happened? Because I remember reading about.

• 42:32Speaker 01

  Intermediate, intermediate fibers.

• 42:34Jocko Willink?

  I guess maybe.

• 42:35Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 42:35Jocko Willink?

  I just remember I was never, I wasn't like the fastest guy, but I I wasn't like the most endurance guy. So I'm like the loser that couldn't win a sprint and I couldn't run. I couldn't win the freaking four mile time run.

• 42:47Speaker 01

  Right.

• 42:48Jocko Willink?

  And I I figured out eventually when I started hearing about like intermediate twitch muscle, that there's certain people that have this thing. And that was me. And I was like, oh, yeah, because like I could put on a rucksack and just go forever.

• 42:58Speaker 01

  Right.

• 42:59Jocko Willink?

  Uh, in jujitsu, like I have really good endurance.

• 43:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:03Jocko Willink?

  I mean, have you seen me get tired?

• 43:05Speaker 01

  No.

• 43:06Jocko Willink?

  So I've been training with him for like ten years, never seen me get tired.

• 43:09Speaker 01

  I remember training with you and like watching you roll guys and you'd just have like sweat pouring off your bit.

• 43:13Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 43:14Speaker 01

  Still like breathing through your nose and like just calmly mashing people. I'm like. That killed me in jets. Like I, cause I mean, I'm good for like three minutes. And then if I haven't, if I haven't won in three minutes, I'm not gonna win. Like by the time, by the, when you do like, you know, three minute rounds or whatever, it's a class. By the time I could tell like, I mean, I might as well be rolling with a five year old girl. Cause I have nothing. I have no strength whatsoever.

• 43:40Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. But I, I just didn't have that, that explosive, you know, again, like max deadlift. Like I'd be embarrassed. I'd be like, dude, I'm, I'm just pathetic.

• 43:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:52Jocko Willink?

  And that's just the way it is. I mean, it's just a different, you get, you get your certain genetic thing and that's what you're gonna, you can work on it a little bit.

• 43:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:00Jocko Willink?

  You can get to do a lot of pushups instead of a lot of bench, I guess, apparently.

• 44:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, you, uh, I mean, nobody, nobody is like a hundred percent of any fiber, right? And like in different muscles of your body, you're going to have different makeups of them. And so like everybody, everybody can train to some degree to get better. To get reasonably good at something. If you really work, it's just like any, it's like your mental aptitude.

• 44:25Jocko Willink?

  But like you would have zero percent chance of being a good marathon runner.

• 44:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. And you, here's how smart I am though. When I was in medical school and residency, I knew that the smart thing to do then was to start doing triathlons. Cause I was going to get good at this damn endurance thing finally, right? So when I was in college, I worked full time and I went to school, I worked part time and, uh, but it is a lot of it for part time. It's like 30 hours a week. And then I went to school full time. Uh, and you know, for half of it, I was married and had kids and whatever. So like, I was burning the candle at both ends. Uh, you know, staying up late for, right? Get papers and whatever. Finals and all that. And, uh, so all I really had time to do is run. So I'd come home and I ran.

• 45:14Speaker 01

  And it started like around the three miles and then it's four and then it's five and then six. And then I said, you know, I'm gonna do a marathon. Because, you know, whatever. I've never, like, I've never been good at endurance. I'm gonna get good at endurance. So I did a marathon. Brutal, like, uh, like, I, I have, I have the type of endurance where like, if I go slow, I can go forever. But I don't, I can't go fast. Like, if I go fast and I go, if I go anaerobic once and hit like that lactate threshold, like, I'm done. Like, I'm done. In fact, I did that on one of the triathlons, uh, so, anyway, I did that and I started doing, well, I'm gonna do triathlons. And so I started with the super frog.

• 45:53Jocko Willink?

  Did you, how much weight? Did you have to lose a bunch of weight? Or did you lose weight while you were doing that? Or did you just go Clydesdale?

• 45:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was doing Clydesdale. And something happened to me at some point in my life. It was after the teams. So it was during college, I think. My body weight, like, settled out around 240. Give or take five pounds, right? Nothing I did changed that. And to this day, nothing changes that. I can starve myself. Like, I can lose weight for a little while, but like, give me two days and I'm right back to 240. I can be like, kinda doughy and soft and out of shape and I weigh 240. I can be ripped and like, no body fat, 240. It's like, that's just what I weigh. And so I was running marathons at that, at that weight. And so I did the super frog. And, uh, cause, you know, it's the original, like, throwback to the teens. Like, it'd be cool.

• 46:46Speaker 01

  And so I, and they have a cutoff time, right? Like, if you don't finish by a certain time.

• 46:50Jocko Willink?

  And it's basically a half triathlon, right?

• 46:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, yes. Yeah, it's a half, it's a half, it's a half Ironman. So it's 1.2 mile swim, 56 mile bike ride and half marathon.

• 47:01Speaker 01

  And so I, I do it. And if you don't make the cutoff time, then you're, you're DNF, right? Did not finish. Same as somebody who drops out. I made it by like three minutes. I think it was like seven and a half hours and there's dudes doing this thing like this guy's doing it like two and a half hours, right? And so I finish and barely make it. Three years later, I've been doing triathlon the whole time, right? I ride my bike to work or ride my bike back and forth to the school, the hospital, whatever.

• 47:32Speaker 01

  You know, running whenever I can. I never really practiced a swim. Cause I, I actually just did side stroke because my side stroke was as fast as my crawl anyway. So I just did that. And you can do that forever. Obviously like after Bud's like you get so, you get so efficient at that movement. I could go 20 miles today, probably. And so I, I do it again. Three years later, I'm two minutes faster.

• 47:55Jocko Willink?

  After all that training and everything?

• 47:57Speaker 01

  I'm going back to powerlifting.

• 48:00Speaker 01

  Like this, like when I, when I was training at, when I was training at Odie Neto's school.

• 48:07Speaker 01

  Do you know him?

• 48:08Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 48:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I was training at his school and I was, it was like incorporating the jet training into my bike ride.

• 48:15Jocko Willink?

  Bike there.

• 48:16Speaker 01

  No, it was biking to the hospital and then leaving the hospital and stopping by there and then going. And so that added like five or six miles to my commute. And, and I still gassed all the time. And I was like, what the hell? Like, cause I didn't understand the physiology at the time. And I'm like, how can I still be gassing like all, like I'm doing all this endurance work and I'm still gassing on the mats. Like, I remember the first time he had us do like, he put out like whatever the five or six black belts. And it's like, you're going to roll two minutes here and then, and then the last guy rolled with this him. I mean, he'd just like thump me and fall over it, thump me and like, I couldn't do.

• 48:53Jocko Willink?

  You're like a dream for like a guy that owns a school that's a black belt and Odie, Odie probably weighs, what do you think Odie Neto weighed?

• 49:00Speaker 02

  Seventy maybe?

• 49:00Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, maybe one seventy.

• 49:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:02Jocko Willink?

  So he's just like, oh, I get to beat up this seal.

• 49:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. I always try to keep it on the down low that has a seal, but it gets out eventually, right?

• 49:10Jocko Willink?

  And then you're just, you're just a jacked 240 pound dude. Like they, with a white belt on.

• 49:16Speaker 01

  Right. Oh, yeah.

• 49:18Jocko Willink?

  Jeff Glover, Jeff Glover, and I've seen this now. He the best, the worst, uh, I always call it the best, the worst, but it's the easiest for him to go against a guy that's big and strong. Like he, he, he is, if he sees a guy that's big and strong, he's like, oh yeah, I'm gonna have fun with them. And I've watched him do it, watched like big jack guys come in and he just is all over them. And you see like another guy that's more his size or a guy that's, you know, uh, long and lanky or whatever. It's more trouble for him, but a big jack guy, he's like, I got this fool.

• 49:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, didn't, didn't he do like some sort of exhibition here or something with him and another guy?

• 49:54Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, he's done.

• 49:55Speaker 01

  Bar, I mean, or something. It's like watching two snakes fight.

• 49:58Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 49:58Speaker 01

  I mean, it's just like, I mean, this rolled forever, like from, you know, from position to position, position to attempt, attempt, attempt. It's just like, I'm like, I can't even follow this.

• 50:09Jocko Willink?

  Freaking nuts. Um, all right. So you get done with buds. Did you, did you get rolled at all?

• 50:15Speaker 01

  No.

• 50:15Jocko Willink?

  That's good. Uh, and you're, you're what? You're 18, 19 years old?

• 50:20Speaker 01

  So I technically, yeah, so I was, I was 19 cause I graduated and technically, cause we actually had Christmas break before we graduated. We should have graduated. So we were really done with buds and I think we had like a 13 mile time to run or something. Or it wasn't timed, right? It wasn't, was it? There was some time to it, but it wasn't the same as like the four mile.

• 50:42Jocko Willink?

  I think it was more like you better not, you better pass it type thing.

• 50:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:45Jocko Willink?

  But there's, I think there was a time on it, three hours?

• 50:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think there was a time limit, but it wasn't, it wasn't like the same consistent. Like everything else was like, whatever, uh, that's that same time. I think it was seven and a half minute miles was like the cutoff on all that stuff. And that I think was, it was a little longer, but, um, so that's all we had to do is come back and do that. And then we were graduating. So, uh, so I graduated technically in January of 90.

• 51:11Jocko Willink?

  Okay. And then you had to go to airborne school?

• 51:13Speaker 01

  In March, I would have turned 20.

• 51:15Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 51:16Speaker 01

  So, yeah, it was not, end of, yeah. And then we went to, we were the first class that they sent us a class.

• 51:21Jocko Willink?

  Oh, really?

• 51:22Speaker 01

  They hadn't done it in a really long time. Man, did we get in trouble.

• 51:24Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah.

• 51:25Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. We got, and we were there the first time anybody died.

• 51:30Speaker 01

  And jump school.

• 51:31Jocko Willink?

  Really?

• 51:31Speaker 01

  And the dude, I mean, he was like from here, probably to um, probably to the mats like that far away from me like I I heard that.

• 51:41Jocko Willink?

  He just wrapped it in. What happened to him?

• 51:43Speaker 01

  We're doing combat equipment.

• 51:44Jocko Willink?

  Uh huh.

• 51:45Speaker 01

  And uh, he, I don't know if his exit was bad or whatever, but he ended up inverted with his leg caught in the and uh, and the risers and uh, and he cigarette rolled to some degree. And he pulled his reserve, but his ruck was on top of it because it had flopped on it. So he's nineteen, he's from Texas.

• 52:08Jocko Willink?

  That's horrible, man.

• 52:08Speaker 01

  And then he just, I mean, I heard that dude hit and then it sounded like just like after you shoot a deer or something and you hear the right, that that and I I remember that so clearly. And then anyway, uh, we, you know, we'd go in the chow hall there and you know how the those army kids are taking that school seriously and we're we're cocky as shit like going, you can't, whatever. This is a joke for us. And so we'd sit around and smoke and joke in the in the chow hall for like an hour and like, you know, keep going back and whatever. And so this stars and stripe reporter comes around and he starts trying to ask everybody questions. Army kids are, you know, eating like a robot and then boltin' out the door, right? And uh, and so we were like, hey,

• 52:53Speaker 01

  I'll tell you what happened. So we told him that uh, we told him that uh, that the guy didn't hook up because he was gonna D O R at the door. And the instructor pushed him out.

• 53:06Speaker 01

  And of course, we had no idea what went on. And they printed it and they said,

• 53:09Jocko Willink?

  Oh my god.

• 53:10Speaker 01

  as told by any Navy personnel. And so like then our whole class gets called up in front of the head of the school. It's like, if you don't tell me who did this, throwing all of you out. Of course, like no one's gonna say anything, right? I remember like, all right, throw us all out. That's better than you getting rid of one of our guys, right?

• 53:27Jocko Willink?

  It's better than being a rat.

• 53:28Speaker 01

  Right. And so nobody said anything. The school shut down for like two weeks and we just got like hammered on like all the time, like all day, every day. They're trying to break out and now the dude ended up printing or tracking whatever, but um, yeah, the first time anybody died, so there's a couple of weeks.

• 53:43Jocko Willink?

  There had to have been other people that died at Airborne School.

• 53:45Speaker 01

  They told us this is the first time anybody's ever burned in.

• 53:48Jocko Willink?

  That seems impossible.

• 53:50Speaker 01

  It does.

• 53:50Jocko Willink?

  They put out thousands and thousands of

• 53:53Speaker 01

  I know.

• 53:53Jocko Willink?

  paratroopers every week now. Maybe it's the first guy that died in a while or something like that.

• 53:58Speaker 01

  Maybe, but they did, they shut us down, they shut the school down.

• 54:01Jocko Willink?

  We're gonna get fact checked on that one.

• 54:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, we, they shut the school down and we did, uh, I mean, just like nothing for like two weeks. And then when we finally jocked up to go again, they were still super edgy.

• 54:13Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah.

• 54:13Speaker 01

  And we sat, like, we sat jocked up in combat equipment for like six hours waiting.

• 54:18Jocko Willink?

  Hundred percent.

• 54:19Speaker 01

  To get in, to get in the plane and jump out for five seconds. Yeah, it was, it would, it wasn't a cool, like a cool time.

• 54:27Jocko Willink?

  So you end up checking into, you go to team five.

• 54:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:29Jocko Willink?

  Um, and this is what, nineteen, nineteen ninety now?

• 54:33Speaker 01

  Nineteen ninety, yeah. STT, what we called it then.

• 54:36Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 54:36Speaker 01

  And so that's QT.

• 54:37Jocko Willink?

  And that's at the team.

• 54:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, every team did their own.

• 54:40Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, that's what I went through too.

• 54:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, you did, you would have done that.

• 54:43Jocko Willink?

  Um.

• 54:44Speaker 01

  You were what, one seventy seven?

• 54:46Jocko Willink?

  One seventy seven, what, what class were you?

• 54:47Speaker 01

  Fucking new guy.

• 54:48Jocko Willink?

  What, one sixty three?

• 54:49Speaker 01

  One sixty four.

• 54:49Jocko Willink?

  One sixty four?

• 54:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:51Jocko Willink?

  Uh, yeah, new guy, always.

• 54:53Speaker 01

  Um.

• 54:55Jocko Willink?

  So you get in your first platoon, any, any big deal from STT? Pretty straightforward?

• 55:01Speaker 01

  No.

• 55:01Jocko Willink?

  Were you, they, we, did they just hand you an M sixty and say, here you go?

• 55:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:05Jocko Willink?

  You're a jack.

• 55:05Speaker 01

  Which was, which was cool with me.

• 55:07Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 55:07Speaker 01

  Cause I got, I, I, I hate, you know, I hated the M sixteen and like, I don't wanna carry that little poodle weapon. Pink and pinking, I like the spring sound, like shooting a cap gun, I want a real gun, man. I loved the sixty and I was super mechanical, right? Like I, I grew up like working on everything and like super mechanical. So I was really good at clearing the jams and knowing how to, you know, work the weapon really well. And I really enjoyed it.

• 55:32Jocko Willink?

  Hell, yeah. Oh, then you, so that's where you go, you're your first platoon?

• 55:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:36Jocko Willink?

  And?

• 55:37Speaker 01

  First lieutenant rep, sixty.

• 55:39Jocko Willink?

  First lieutenant rep, get some.

• 55:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, and actually halfway through my first platoon, I became the department lead as a new guy.

• 55:48Jocko Willink?

  Right on.

• 55:49Speaker 01

  Uh, and then, and then I was like, always first lieutenant for my other two platoons.

• 55:56Jocko Willink?

  Just motorhead, you're a motorhead.

• 55:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:58Jocko Willink?

  So you're getting in there, so what do you, and you're going on deployment, I mean.

• 56:05Jocko Willink?

  What's workup like? What do you guys focused on? What's the big mission? I know when I was, you know, for my early platoons, it was always like, we were preparing for like, one big mission that we would pray would happen. Like, we wouldn't, we, as much as I prayed for war, which I did.

• 56:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:20Jocko Willink?

  I couldn't have dreamed of like, a two decade long war. Like, I thought, if we're lucky, we'll get some kind of a, one mission, you know, there'll be something will happen. And if we're in the right spot at the right time, maybe we'll get to do one thing.

• 56:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:36Jocko Willink?

  That's how scarce it was.

• 56:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, people don't know that you're like, competing like used car salesman for any work that comes out for special forces. It's like, you have to have somebody jockeying to try to get the work.

• 56:48Jocko Willink?

  Was Gardner in your first platoon?

• 56:50Speaker 01

  No, he was in, uh, he's in my sister.

• 56:52Jocko Willink?

  Didn't you guys get like rolled up or something?

• 56:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. My, my 21st birthday.

• 57:00Jocko Willink?

  Jack.

• 57:02Speaker 01

  So we walk, I can't remember, I can't remember any of the names of the bars, but we walk into this one bar and it's really common one. And, uh, Jason was standing up on the bar when I, when I walked in. Chugged a beer and then like slammed the bottle on the ground. Why? Because I can. I'm like, I'm gonna like this guy.

• 57:26Speaker 01

  So that, that wasn't my birthday. I take it back. That's like when we first.

• 57:29Jocko Willink?

  That was just like a Tuesday night.

• 57:30Speaker 01

  That was like the first, that's like the first time I think I'd been out in town, really. You know, it wasn't a big deal because I'd already, obviously you could go drink at any age, but my 21st birthday is like, oh, so the whole platoon. Well, first, of course, yeah, they rigorously tape me and throw me in shit river, so.

• 57:49Speaker 01

  And, and it was so, I was so stupid because we had like a trailer, right? Divided in half and the PI. And you, did you guys have the same thing?

• 57:56Jocko Willink?

  I did, I did, I missed it.

• 57:59Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, right. Cause of Mount Penn too, but yeah. So we had the, just like a regular trailer and it was like partitioned and there's platoons based on each side and they had like a regular half.

• 58:10Speaker 01

  Padlock on, on the outside. And so. We were walking up, we were walking up to our trailer and our sister platoon was in their, was in their side and my LPO goes up and he like puts their hasp in like while they're, while they're in these lock. And so I think, oh, he's locking them in, right? And then we have our platoon meeting and then he goes, uh, and at the end of the meeting, he looks around, he says, hey, whatever you guys do, I don't want you to rigor state buck up and throw them in shit river. And I look around and every single guy's holding a roll

• 58:50Speaker 01

  of rigor state. And I, I totally missed this the whole time. I'm like, oh, you gotta be kidding me, man. Now I realize, oh, that site's locked. That's what that was about. And it was just a shit fight, man. I mean, just like 45 minutes and uh, finally gut just grabbed my balls and just started squeezing my balls like.

• 59:15Jocko Willink?

  That's the fight ender.

• 59:16Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 59:17Jocko Willink?

  Everyone's a tough guy.

• 59:18Speaker 01

  Tape me up.

• 59:19Jocko Willink?

  Guy grabs your nuts and starts squeezing them.

• 59:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. And uh, anyways, and yeah. So we go, we go out in the town and I don't even remember how it started. Like, I don't even hardly remember the fight at all. I like knocked some shore patrol guy out and just went to the bar because I was drunk moron and like, I'll be fine. Like he's unconscious. So I go in the bar and then when we come out of the bar, they're like, there he is. And like all these people start swarming out and try to run. And then like I hit some other guy while I was trying to run away and they finally got us. And then, or got me. And then they handcuffed me in front. And I'm like, you know, even a

• 1:00:04Speaker 01

  drunk guy's like, that's a dumb idea, right? And uh, so I, so I started walking to the paddy wagon. It's like a Toyota truck with like the built on kind of camper, whatever, like a paddy wagon thing. And uh, And the dude that I the tour patrol guy that I'd hit was like standing there holding the door smirking and said like said something smart and I fucking hit him again with both hands in front of him like he he went out cold and hit his head on the bumper and I was like, oh, that's really not good. So then they People don't recognize how stupid we can be. Yeah, yeah. They just don't know. Yeah. So then they throw me in the paddy wagon and I'm drunk. I just like through the wagon spinning. I'm so drunk. And so I lay down on my back and put my feet in the

• 1:00:48Speaker 01

  corners. And then when we get to the jail, so when he when I get in there, Jason's in there with me. And he's like, hey, man. I'm like, hey, and they like, he I don't know what he was in there for. I don't even remember. And then they get us to the police station and they pull everybody out. And I'm like, I'm not getting out. And they they're trying to pull me out. They can't get me out. And so they lock the door. And they go in and they come back. They try to get me out again. I won't get out. And then they bring out this big, their big tough guy, shore patrol guy, whatever. And he's going to get me out. So they put him in and lock the door. And, and I, I managed to like, put some pressure on his shoulder and like, pull him into me. And he and it was like, essentially breaking his wrist backwards, right? Like, because he and he couldn't get off of it. Because

• 1:01:33Speaker 01

  like, the way his body position, like, he was just half his body weight was on his wrist and it was inverted. And I'm just pulling on him and he's screaming. They let him out. And then I'm still laying there. And then all of a sudden, I hear, it's maybe 45 minutes ago, and I hear my officer go, hey, Buck. I was like, yeah, he's let's go. And I get out. They unhandcuffed me and and I went back to barracks with him. And then, you know, your senior chief, whatever goes and smooths things over the next day, gives the guy a case of beer, whatever. Like, this is stupid as time. Like, we like, all of our excitement was self-induced. And and I was in for the first Gulf War, right? Like, so the first Gulf War shut my workup down. Was that your first workup?

• 1:02:18Speaker 01

  My first workup, yeah. And, and we were, we were, so we got, the cool thing was because of that, whatever they thought the mission set was, they, we became a freefall platoon. And so the first thing I did was go to freefall school. I think I only had like, Two or three more jumps, whatever you get in STT was like the only other jumps I'd had other than jump school. So I'd never did static line again, right? I just, unless it's in the water, right for duck or something. Yeah. So we, we, uh, we got our, our workup got, I think workups are like a year and a half then, right? And it got, we got shut down to about a year, uh, got compressed. And then we didn't end up going to Gulf War anyways, because I think maybe

• 1:03:03Speaker 01

  it was like half over. Like, you know, how limited that whole thing was. And so then we deployed to the PI and then, uh, mountain penitibo blew when we were out there and that, that was a very interesting.

• 1:03:15Jocko Willink?

  And what'd you guys do on that? Just like provide as much security?

• 1:03:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. So we, so we were, so a lot of people don't know this, but like when that mount, when mountain penitibo blew, probably because it blew, there was a typhoon at the same time. And so, you know, Clark Air Base, the Air Force Base, which was a 45 minute drive or something, they had boulders the size of this room coming down from miles high in the sky and just like landing on buildings and cars and whatever. And, uh, that place was demolished and, but we just got all this ash. We got some rocks, but like we got all this ash and the ash had a ton of metal ore in it. And it was mixed in with

• 1:03:59Speaker 01

  the typhoon. So you have like 70, 80 mile an hour winds with rain and then this ash with all this metal in it. And it was, and it was sticking, it sticks to everything and it looks like kind of grayish snow, but it's super heavy and it collapses there. It's like all the buildings are collapsing. I got our, our PBs and our, and our peers, our floating peers were sinking and all our buildings are collapsing. So they're like, it was like the first night of this thing. And they're like, hey, we all need to go down to the unit and like save all the, so we go and we, you know, we, we don't even have shuttles. We have boat oars, right? Like, and, uh, and we're just, and like a boat ore of this stuff probably weighed 30 pounds. Like it was just super compact.

• 1:04:42Speaker 01

  And so we go and we shovel all that off and then we're going up on the roofs and we're trying to save, you know, the buildings. We are up on the paraloft and uh, there's no light, right? You can't see anything. We're wearing flight suits with scuba mask. Uh, and you could shine a flashlight and you could about see your feet. Pre-headlamp, right? It's so crazy. No one had thought of headlamps. Yeah. And so I get up to the top of the paraloft and these guys are yelling, hey, over here, over here, over here. And it's sounding like I'm walking their way. And all of a sudden I stop and I'm like, I feel like I'm, I feel like I'm going the wrong, I'm trying to remember what the building was like. I was like, I feel like I'm going the wrong way. And I pull out a flashlight and I look at my feet and one of my feet is like, one of my toes are hanging

• 1:05:25Speaker 01

  over the edge. Like one more step, I was gonna fall 60 feet. And uh, so anyway, we're shoving all this off and then we go into like one of the big barn kind of things. And we're shelling off and like buildings are collapsing while we're on them. And we're like jumping off, whatever. And so then we all kind of show up in this, in this barn that has like the big I-beams supporting the roof, right? And uh, we're in there and somebody's like, I think maybe we should get out of here. What if this one collapses? And I look up and I'm like, there's no way this is gonna. And we're like, we all dive out, like the doors, uh, you know, it's like this wide, the doors open this wide and like 20 guys get through that thing in like five seconds, you know, and the whole thing collapses. And so, um,

• 1:06:08Speaker 01

  so there was no power for like six weeks. There's no water. There is no anything and there were bodies laying in the ditches all over the place. Of course, in town, they have like generators going and everything's going like, two days later, they're like up and running. Nothing ever happened. And then we had like the uh, they call them the NPA, like the Vietnam equivalent, or the Philippine equivalent of the Vietnamese communists, I guess. Um, and they start trying to infiltrate the base and like get equipment and all this stuff. And we were closing the base, uh, cause there was so much damage and the negotiations had failed. I think we offered them like $10 million and they went like $100 million.

• 1:06:51Speaker 01

  And we're like, sorry, we're out of here. So we were gonna close the base anyway. And so they started trying to come on the base. And so we were like patrolling against them and like, you know, arresting some of those guys and stuff. And I was like, they're kind of like the closest thing to combat that, that we saw, you know? Um, we had a

• 1:07:09Speaker 01

  Like drug interdiction with the FBI and stuff, you know, like that was like the the most exciting thing I did, which is kind of one of the reasons I got out is like, you know, it's just like the same training trips over and over again, doing the same stuff over and over again. It's like, I don't think we're ever gonna go to war again. Like I'm gonna go do something else, you know?

• 1:07:25Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:26Speaker 01

  And then of course, while I'm in medical school, nine 11 happens.

• 1:07:28Jocko Willink?

  So you did, you did a couple more platoons at Team Five. And like you said, like you're, it's the nineties and you're just going through workup. It's, it's always fun. I mean,

• 1:07:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's super fun. Yeah. Holly Hollywood SEALs, what we call it, you know, it's like, it was like, I just super fun.

• 1:07:42Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And you're, well, for me, I was always like, thought the big mish was coming. And so I was always just like, hey, you know, we gotta be ready. In my mind, I was trying to be ready.

• 1:07:51Speaker 01

  I wish I had your confidence in that. I was like, we had Bill Clinton in the White House. I'm like, we're never going to war. Kidding me?

• 1:07:59Jocko Willink?

  So you do a couple more platoons and then you're like, all right. Did you, when you, when you decided to get out, did you know you wanted to become a doctor?

• 1:08:07Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:08:08Jocko Willink?

  So what was your plan? What was your plan when you got out?

• 1:08:11Speaker 01

  Well, so I started dating this girl who became my first wife, like after, after my first platoon. I dated her during my second workup and then I deployed and then I came back and I was supposed to do like nine months of shore duty and I like work in the department, start school, kind of transition out. And then I got thrown into a platoon because somebody got hurt. And so kind of deployed actually until, it's supposed to be until the day I got out, but it ended up being like four or five days after I got, I was actually technically out and I came back. Anyway, so I, she was in physical therapy school.

• 1:08:49Jocko Willink?

  So wait, so you're dating each other or you got married? Did you say?

• 1:08:51Speaker 01

  No, we, we were dating at the time.

• 1:08:52Jocko Willink?

  You're dating and you figure, you're, you date this, you start dating this girl, you figure you're gonna get a guy, gonna get out, but you end up getting thrown into a platoon, you do the deployment, you come home, you have no plan and you're out of the Navy, boom, done.

• 1:09:05Speaker 01

  Right. Okay.

• 1:09:05Jocko Willink?

  And she's going to physical therapy school?

• 1:09:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. So she, by the time I came back from my second deployment, she is like three months out of grad school and she was working at San Diego Children's Hospital. And, and I used to take her textbooks on deployment and read them because I, like, I was just interested in. You know, physiology and anatomy and like anything to make me bigger and stronger and faster and whatever, better. And so I felt like I had an interest in that, but I didn't, you know, I'd never done well in school. I was convinced that I was dumb really until I, until I got in the name, like in A school, I did really well, like I top of my class and then like I did really well academically in BUDS. And so I thought, well, maybe I'm not stupid. Maybe I just like never really applied myself, but we'll see, right? So you go like, you know, I have a GED, so I can't

• 1:09:52Speaker 01

  get into any college. I have to go to at least a year of junior college, probably two. And so I went there and like started setting the curve in every class. I thought maybe it was going to be like JADU or something, like an athletic trainer, maybe a physical therapist if like things really worked out great for me. And to, to apply to physical therapy school, you have to like have 2,000 volunteer hours, right? Well, that's, that's a year of full-time work, right? So part-time work, that gets a couple of years. And so I'm like, well, I get, I'll start getting my volunteer hours in. And they hired me after I'd volunteered there for maybe a week. And they're like, we want you to come work for us. And so then I worked as a physical therapy assistant at San Diego Sports

• 1:10:34Speaker 01

  Medicine Center, the whole time I was in college. And that was like a healthcare mecca. They had everything, you know, they had orthopedic surgeons, they had sports medicine guys, they had DOs, they had MDs, they had podiatrists, they had massage therapists, PTs, athletic trainers. So we, we had everything and I, I got to know all of the people and got to see everybody's work. And I'm standing in the hallway with a couple of doctors, because they were about my age, right? Because I'd, because I'd, you know, been in the teams first. So they're maybe two or three years older than me. And I got

• 1:11:16Speaker 01

  to be friends with them and we're standing out in the hallway one day and, and.

• 1:11:22Speaker 01

  They're telling me you should go to medical school.

• 1:11:26Speaker 01

  Pump the brakes there, Sparky. Like, I didn't, like, I'm, like, I'm even close to medical school. And so they're trying to convince me that I can get into medical school. And I'm like, no fricking way I can get in. I'm getting into medical school. And then the, the doctor that owned it, Lee Rice, he's out here still. And he said, he steps out of the office and he goes, Kirk. I didn't even know he knew my name, right? He said, Kirk.

• 1:11:50Speaker 01

  The question isn't whether you can get in. The question is, would you go if you got in? And I said, of course. He goes, well, then you kind of have to try, don't you? I was like, shit.

• 1:12:00Jocko Willink?

  Trapped you.

• 1:12:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was like, that's right. And then I ended up going to work for him when I got out of the Navy. Like, my first year of the Navy, I went back to his practice. He had a concierge practice in Point Loma out here. And, uh, yeah.

• 1:12:13Speaker 01

  But that, that's how that came about, man. And, and I, I mean, I was fully planning to be an orthopedic surgeon because I'm like a mechanical dude and I like, I like the succinct, like, broken, not broken.

• 1:12:24Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:24Speaker 01

  Hey, this is broke. I mean, put some bolts and screws and then plates and it's not going to be broken anymore. And that's it. And then I'm going to go in and do it again. Uh, I don't want to look at anybody's fricking anion gapper. Like, care about what medications are on. Like, that doesn't, that doesn't interest me. I wanted to go fix things. And, uh, and then in, in the Navy, you have to do an operational tour before they'll let you finish residency. So you do like your first year. And then they, you have to go up to the fleet. If you don't, if you don't, uh...

• 1:12:55Jocko Willink?

  So wait, so you already gotten commissioned or were you planning to go back in the Navy? What was all this about?

• 1:12:59Speaker 01

  Totally skipped that part. Yeah. So when, so when I decided to apply for medical school, pre-internet, so I went to the bookstore and started looking through the Kaplan books to see like, what schools would I be competitive for with my, with my GPA and my MCAT and all that. And that's when I found out this Navy had its own school. And I was like, no way. Are you kidding me? And so I looked into it's like, they'll pay me to go to medical school. Instead of the other way around. And of course, I'm married and have a kid and have a kid on the way. Damn. Uh, like, well, that makes a lot more sense, right? Like, I wasn't excited to go in the Navy. Trust me, like I, you know, I was in the teams. That's a good fit for the team, but I wasn't a good fit for the Navy.

• 1:13:40Speaker 01

  I knew that. And, uh, and I was like, all right, well, uh, I'll do this, right? And I, and I knew that there was, you know, this eight year commitment afterwards. And I was like, well, I'll, I'll go back to the teams for a while and I'll like give back to the community who saved me from prison. Or, you know, whatever I was gonna end up if I, if I didn't have, you know, something to, uh, channel my anger with, right? And, uh, so I, I, I did, you know, when you do your operational, so you got commissioned in 2000, go to OIS Connecticut, basically. The knife and fork school? Yeah, knife and fork school. They gave me some kind of award there. It's ridiculous. I didn't, I think I did like, I participated in like 25% of that school.

• 1:14:26Speaker 01

  Uh, they couldn't make pants for me. I have really big legs and kind of a normal waist. And they kept making, they're like trying to make khaki pants, like from scratch, like these girls. And they were ridiculous. I mean, and it was just like, they kept trying all this stuff. So I, I never had a uniform and I'd be like, well, I gotta go to, I gotta go to the uniform store again. And that's all I did for like three weeks was like, try to get a uniform to fit. And then, uh, and, and so, and then they give me some sort of award. It was comical. Um, and then, uh, go to medical school and, uh, then from there I did, uh, you know, there were some hoopla I won't get into, but, uh, ended up coming back to San Diego to do.

• 1:15:12Speaker 01

  Internship, which is the first year residency essentially. And then you have to go out to the fleet. Did you do that at Balboa? I did it at Balboa, yeah. And the, you do that and if, and then after that year, if you just say, "Hey, I just want to come back as soon as possible," then they just send you out to some fleet job. You're probably going to go 32nd Street, be on the ship or something, right? But if you go to flight school, you can be a flight surgeon, you go to dive school and, and a UMO school in Connecticut, and then you can obviously go back to like our units or dive unit or something like that. So I was like, "Oh, I'll do DMO and I'll go back to the teams for a while, then I'll come back and finish residency."

• 1:15:55Speaker 01

  And I, I went to dive school and then at the end of it, there weren't, there weren't any orders to the teams. So they put me on, at the submarine rescue unit out here on the end of Point Loma. No, not, I'm sorry, it's at the end of North Island now. And that was like a policy job really, because a lot of people don't realize this, but like every country that has submarines, like they all, they all have this agreement that we'll, we'll rescue each other submarines. Even our enemies, like China, Russia, it doesn't matter. Like your submarine goes down in our waters and it's savable,

• 1:16:38Speaker 01

  we'll use our system to save your guys, because technically these systems can go anywhere in the world, but with a realistic time window, it's probably not realistic to like fly it over there and set everything up. So you're going to be much better off if the country that you're closest to saves them. And so then you have to make all these agreements, like, well, who, whose patients are they going to be? Whose dive tables are we going to use? If we have to recompress them, like what, like what's going to be our program? And so that's all we did, was travel around the world and meet endless meetings and come up with new policy. And then, then had the opportunity to either go back to the hospital.

• 1:17:17Speaker 01

  Or go to the teams. I was like, I really feel like I should do that. And so then I go back to the teams and that's right when they called it. I think they were calling it, they're still calling it the human performance program and then switched to the tactical athletic program. And so I got there right when they were funding the build out of that clinic.

• 1:17:37Jocko Willink?

  Nice.

• 1:17:38Speaker 01

  Of course, I was a perfect fit for that. It's a fricking PT clinic. Like duh. Like I did this for, I did this all through college. Like I know what I'm doing. So, and then like, and it was a great time. Like I got to be there when we hired everybody. Like when, when we hired the first, you know, the first athletic trainer, the first PT, the first nutritionist, the first strength and conditioning coach, like.

• 1:17:56Jocko Willink?

  Which is crazy to think about everything that you're just saying is the first, the first, the first, the first.

• 1:17:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, in 2009.

• 1:18:00Jocko Willink?

  We didn't have any of this stuff.

• 1:18:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:18:02Jocko Willink?

  It was just like.

• 1:18:03Speaker 01

  Your PT was whatever your CO or whatever your XO was into. So your XO liked to run and swim. Guess what you were doing for PT? Like run, swim, or swim run.

• 1:18:13Jocko Willink?

  If you got injured, it was like.

• 1:18:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. Like you dealt with it.

• 1:18:16Jocko Willink?

  Pretty much just figured out.

• 1:18:17Speaker 01

  Whatever your corpsman could do for you. Because you weren't going to drive across the bridge and go to rehab at PT, at fricking Balboa.

• 1:18:24Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And even if you do that, what are they rehabbing a sailor at Balboa for? They're rehabbing him to like get out of the Navy with a medical retirement or whatever. That's what they're rehabbing him for. In the teams, the guys want to go back to work.

• 1:18:38Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:18:39Jocko Willink?

  Like I'm hurt. You make me better now. Right. I've got to go to Nyland in two weeks. Make me better right now.

• 1:18:44Speaker 01

  Right. And that's the other thing. You're traveling so much. Like how much rehab do you really have? Unless you're going to get pulled out of your platoon, but you might as well die before you do that. Like just let your arm fall off. Like maybe you'll still be able to make it. Yeah, that, that happened to Stump. So Stump came over and saw me when he was getting out. And he's like, I didn't know him. Uh, I knew who, I knew who he was. And, uh, and he, he comes over and he's like, hey, you know, I'm, I'm getting out in like two days and everybody keeps telling me you should look at my record. So here it is. So he gives me his record. It's like paper thin. And I open it and his, and his discharge physical is like, good to go. Everything's good.

• 1:19:24Speaker 01

  I'm sitting there, I'm like, didn't you get shot? He's like, yeah. I'm like, you know, none of that's in here. He's like, does that matter? I'm like, yeah, that matters. Like, I said, regardless of how you feel now, if you start having some serious problems and you need surgery, revision, like big care, like that, you know, what if, you know, what if? And so he's, he's like, oh, okay. And so then I checked into it. I'm like, dude, you're gonna have to stay in there. And he was pissed, man.

• 1:19:55Jocko Willink?

  Oh, sure.

• 1:19:55Speaker 01

  And he ended up, he ended up, I just saw him recently and I was like, are you still pissed at me? He's like, no, best thing I remember.

• 1:20:02Jocko Willink?

  How much longer, how much longer?

• 1:20:04Speaker 01

  I think he ended up in like, in another year.

• 1:20:06Jocko Willink?

  Damn.

• 1:20:07Speaker 01

  Cause he had to go through a med board.

• 1:20:08Jocko Willink?

  Oh, for sure.

• 1:20:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. But I mean, there was nothing in there. There's nothing in his record. It was literally just like, signed off, like, good, good, good, good. See medical record.

• 1:20:17Jocko Willink?

  Like I said, when I was, what's your answer to the question? It's like, fine, yep. How's your shoulders? Fine, knee, fine, neck, fine, yep. Got surgery, yep, it's fine now. Yeah, everything is just fine, fine, fine. Can I get out of here now?

• 1:20:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:20:26Jocko Willink?

  I want to leave.

• 1:20:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, like you're saying at the beginning, no, nobody wants to see the doctor, but more to the point, nobody trusts the doctor. All right. Cause that's the guy who can put you on the bench. What's the worst thing you do to a team guy? Pull him out of his position. I give you something that's disqualifying. I say, oh, you have a problem. You need meds. You're disqualified. You can't take any real medication in the teams. And, uh, you know, that, I mean, interestingly, because of that nuance, that's, that's why I ended up learning everything that I learned as a SEAL teams and doing what I do now. I mean, less than 1% of what I do now has anything to do with what I learned in medical school or residency or anything. Like, it's, it's all outside.

• 1:21:10Jocko Willink?

  I was talking to a guy that was, oh, it was Jason. I think it was Jason, but you know, he'd come from where? The, the baseball or football?

• 1:21:20Speaker 01

  Where'd he come from? Yeah. Jet show was baseball.

• 1:21:23Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And maybe it wasn't him. I was talking to somebody that was football and, um, he said something like, uh, and he worked at Bud's Medical. And at Bud's Medical, he, he said he would see like,

• 1:21:40Jocko Willink?

  Whatever the number was, forty cases of patella femoral syndrome a week.

• 1:21:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:21:45Jocko Willink?

  And he said when he was with the NFL, he saw like two cases.

• 1:21:49Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:21:49Jocko Willink?

  And it was like that for every injury, like shin splints, if you're at Bud's Medical, you see fifty cases a week of shin splints. And you just go down the list of shoulder injury, this, and so the team's the same way, like, oh, shoulder injury, knee injury. Like, you're just gonna see so many of it. You get so good at it.

• 1:22:06Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:22:07Jocko Willink?

  Uh, that it's like an environment where you're just gonna learn so much. So, so you were in this critical role as this thing kinda stood up where the, the teams started taking the health of the SEAL more like as serious as we could possibly take it.

• 1:22:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, and doing proactive stuff too, right?

• 1:22:28Jocko Willink?

  So what did you, what does being in the teams do to a dude?

• 1:22:36Speaker 01

  Well, so this is how it all got started, right? Uh, we built that facility, we hired all these great people, like you said, pulled people from pro teams, from Olympic Training Center, really top-notch, top-tier colleges and so, so we have all these brilliant people that are great at their job. Now I'm the dumbest guy there, right? Because like, I'm just a guy who like worked in the Sports Medicine Center when I was in college. And like, I don't really know any of this stuff. So what does the Navy do when you're the dumbest guy? Put you in charge, right? So like, well, now you're gonna supervise all these people. And so like, I now have this supervisory position and, and the rehab facility. And so, as you know, like my office was in between those two sides of it. And so guys would be over there doing rehab.

• 1:23:21Speaker 01

  And, you know, I'd been a SEAL recently enough to where there's still a ton of guys in there that I went through training with and that I deployed with. And so I had a good enough reputation, the guys trusted me, and they come and shut the door and like, hey, let me tell you what's really going on with me, right? Cause like you said, fine, fine, fine, like, fine, fine, fine, everything's good, everything's like, you know, they'll you know, put rigorous tape over a bullet hole if they had to, just like, you know, I don't, I don't wanna get put on the bench, I don't trust this dude. Um, and so they came in, I can't remember who the first guy was at this point, but comes in, it's like, you know what's really going on with me? And he's talking about

• 1:23:58Speaker 01

  Well, you know, you can't remember anything, right? He comes in a room, forgets why he's there, leaves. Oh, remember, come back, forget. Uh, you know, leaves his house five, six times in the morning, getting his car back out. Oh, forgot my badge and going, oh, forgot that, forgot that. And, uh, and then they'd be saying, well, you know, my motivation just sucks. My concentration sucks. I sit in, I sit in meetings, I can't, I can't follow anything anybody's saying. Like my attention span is like two seconds or I can be given the brief and I'm not interested in like, you know, but they're team guys, so they're still getting after it, but they just don't feel like getting after it. And they're like, basically I'm getting cold or weak or fatter. You know, like they're following the nutrition's advice, they're following the strength and conditioning advice. They're doing everything exactly how they should do it and they're just, they're getting weaker.

• 1:24:42Speaker 01

  They're getting fatter, they're getting slower, they're getting moody. Sex drives down, sexual performance is down, right? Um, and it's really all performance issues, right? So, um, I'm not as fast, I'm not as strong, I'm not. And then they'd be like, well, you know, but maybe I'm just getting old. And I'm like, yeah, man, you're 34, like it's over for you, right? You're screwed. Uh, you might as well just go, go sex start your seg right now, man. And, uh, so

• 1:25:09Speaker 01

  I honestly didn't have the slightest idea. First guy comes in my office and tells me this, I'm like,

• 1:25:15Speaker 01

  I'm bewildered. I don't know. So I'm like, I'm gonna do a bunch of labs. And, uh, I mean, it's first important to preface this with, when I first got there, the department had, was actually a P A.

• 1:25:30Speaker 01

  Uh, so a physician's assistant was supervising the physician and he'd been in Navy, like he's a former team guy. And one of the first things he tells me in his office, he's like, hey, these guys are going to come to you and expect some special treatment. I'm like, yeah. Like, we can't give it to them.

• 1:25:49Speaker 01

  Why wouldn't I give it to them? He's like, you have to treat everybody the same. I'm like, no, it's in the name, special forces, like they get special treatment. Like, we're, we're here because of the team guys. We're not here for tech support. Like, those guys can go to the hospital, right? Like, if we have the capacity, we'll see them. But like, I'm here to help the team guys. He's like, you can't think of it that way. And I'm like, we're not gonna get along then. Cause that's what I'm gonna do. Like, I'm here to help, I'm here to help the community. I don't give a shit. My, my CO was a supply officer, right? At Groupon. I don't give a shit what that guy wants. I don't care. Like, I'm here to help my, my boys, man. I'm gonna do what they, so, so everything I did was in that vein. And I, and it wasn't popular. It wasn't popular.

• 1:26:32Jocko Willink?

  Popular with the SEALs.

• 1:26:33Speaker 01

  It was popular with the SEALs. So they came in and they tell me this story about all this stuff and nothing they're saying.

• 1:26:41Jocko Willink?

  And this is just like repeat a go, one guy a day, one guy a week.

• 1:26:44Speaker 01

  Well, you know how it goes, like word of mouth. So it's like one and then one and one and then two and then four and, and, you know, I'd say three months after the first guy came in, I'd probably seen a hundred guys, right? And now, I mean, I could've told them their story, but I'd listen, I'd take notes and listen, let them tell it and they all told me the same thing. They've since, they've done some research and they're now calling this operator syndrome. I was calling it the SEAL syndrome. And the syndrome basically means, here's all the symptoms, we don't know why. And so it's a syndrome, right? And so I, I'm just like, well, I'll just test a bunch of labs and see. Like, I don't know. I was doing 98 blood markers.

• 1:27:29Speaker 01

  So they're going over the hospital, getting like 17 vials of blood. And then again, everything that should be high was low and everything that should be low was high. Like their anabolic behavior was super low, catalog stuff really high. Their inflammation really high, oxidation really high, insulin sensitivity even nowhere near what you would expect it to be on a guy this fit and this in shape and this eating this way. And I didn't have the slightest idea. I'm just like, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know. And then, I don't know, maybe 50 or 60 guys into it, somebody said to me, he takes Ambien every night.

• 1:28:12Speaker 01

  And I thought, a lot of guys seem to say that. Yeah, a lot of guys. So I put him, I remember like, one of the few days I was in khakis, like somebody you just remember she's super clear, like way I was sitting at my desk, I'm like, remember putting this note in the margin. And then after he left, I kept shadow files because none of the team guys wanted this stuff in their record. So I'm like, I'm, I'm just keep a shadow file, I'll give it to you when you leave. Yeah. Or when I leave. You do what you want to with it. So I checked in my shadow files, every single guy who'd been in my office was on Ambien, 100% of them. And I was like, huh, I wonder if that could be it. Now, I took pharmacology in medical school. So I knew how Ambien worked.

• 1:28:56Speaker 01

  But I didn't know enough of, like I knew it acts like GABA, right? GABA is a neuropeptide. And like you heard of gabapentin, you give it for nerve pain because it slows down nerve function essentially, right? And I'm like, but I don't know enough about sleep to know why that's significant. What GABA does in sleep, I don't know. I didn't have a single class on sleep in medical school. And, and you know, the way the pharmaceutical industry works, yeah, that when they apply for FDA approval, they own the research and they give the FDA what they want to give them. They don't give them what they don't want to give them. And but then if they ever get sued in court, they have to pull up the skirt and show everything. So that had happened with Ambien,

• 1:29:39Speaker 01

  like right before this happened. And so they were getting sued. And so now we knew the real side effect profile. And so I just had to learn a ton about non-traditional medicine, had to learn a ton about sleep. I thought maybe it was adrenal fatigue, like I was trying, which isn't even like a real thing. But yeah, that was kind of like the alternative medicine thing. Well, adrenal fatigue, it's like an HPA mismatch that there's some validity to it, but it's really not like the way it's proposed. But I was, I was having some success doing that, like, but it wasn't huge. And then, but I'd noticed like everybody's testosterone was low, everybody's growth hormone

• 1:30:21Speaker 01

  was low, like low, low, right? But in medicine, like I'm a Western trained medical physician, right? So I know how to recognize and treat disease. What do I do if it's not disease, right? It's within the bell curve, but. It probably should be higher, but there's no, right? So the chair at UCLA, the Chair of Endocrinology at UCLA had done this research where he, he stratified the bell curve for testosterone and broke it into quintiles, so 20, so 80% to 160, right? In the top quintile, you had the lowest risk of death from any cause, lowest risk of any disease. Every quintile you go down, it doubles.

• 1:31:05Speaker 01

  So by the time you're in the fifth quintile, it's 16 times. You're 16 times more likely to die of any cause. You're 16 times more likely to have any disease. Every guy who came in to see me was in that quintile. Now, if that were magnesium, it would be medical malpractice to not give everybody magnesium and keep them in the upper quintile. But because athletes use testosterone to cheat in sports, it's political, so you don't give that, right? And that's a no-no. So I wasn't about, they weren't about to let me give guys testosterone. But then I learned, hey, when you're sleeping, that's when your testosterone's made. That's when everything's rebalanced, all your hormones. The most anabolic time in your life is the first sleep cycle, right? You go through your first sleep cycle and most, the most of that is deep sleep.

• 1:31:48Speaker 01

  Deep sleep has the lowest stress hormones, the catabolic hormones, that you'll ever have in 24 hours. And it has the highest anabolic. So most of your repair, right? Obviously, when you work out, you don't get stronger. You get weaker. You damage yourself. When it repairs, it comes back stronger. Well, that's happening while you're asleep. So I thought, so once I learned like what goes on when you go to sleep, and what I had going for me was, you had, the teams had already done some great work and I'd had a great reputation, because this is like 2009, right? 2010. And so I could call up anybody, be like, hey, I read your book, or I saw your TED Talk, or heard your lecture.

• 1:32:30Speaker 01

  And I'm the doctor for the West Coast SEAL Team, so I was wondering if I could train with you or consult with you on clients, whether, everybody was like eager to help, right? So I got to learn a lot really quickly. And I start, and I started trying to tell the leadership that I thought that... A lot of their performance issues are chronic injuries and are, you know, just guys not feeling good, not performing well, not feeling motivated, not being resilient. I said, I think a lot of this is from their hormones. I had the proof that their hormones are, they have the hormones of an 80-year-old man, and an 80-year-old fat man, actually. And, and I said, I think it's

• 1:33:13Speaker 01

  sleep. Was that, everybody was like that?

• 1:33:16Jocko Willink?

  I remember, I remember you talking to me, you're like, I was good. And you're like, you're like, dude, you're free. You told me, you told me I had the testosterone of 17-year-old football player. I was like, yes, yes.

• 1:33:26Speaker 01

  There, there, there are some people who, who just get through, like, for whatever reason, they stay resilient, you know, but, but, but I obviously have a biased sample because people are coming to me because they have problems. So like, everybody I-

• 1:33:40Jocko Willink?

  So you were just getting me because I was retiring and like, here I am. Right, right. Got it. So if most of the guys were coming to you, they feel like shit.

• 1:33:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:33:46Jocko Willink?

  And they're just coming to you like, bro, can you please help me?

• 1:33:49Speaker 01

  Right. So then, once I figured out the Ambien thing, I started digging into that.

• 1:33:54Jocko Willink?

  Which, by the way, I've never taken Ambien.

• 1:33:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. You're super unique.

• 1:33:58Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:59Speaker 01

  I, I had, I had the corpsman pull, pull medical records and look, and 85% of our command, of the West Coast, 85% of the West Coast SEAL teams had a prescription for Ambien.

• 1:34:11Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:11Speaker 01

  Whether or not they were taking it, I don't know.

• 1:34:12Jocko Willink?

  Like, my doc, we were on deployment, my doc's like, hey, hey, we need to get, he was like, see, he didn't even need, need to tell me, but he was just telling me like, hey, we're, we're out of Ambien. Or like, we're almost out of Ambien, I gotta get more, I'm going to whatever. And I was kind of like, I didn't really think much of it. Cause like I said, I'd never, I've never even tried it. I don't even know what it feels like. But guys were freaking on Ambien, like it was, like it was, uh, eating M and M's, man.

• 1:34:36Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:34:37Jocko Willink?

  And so what is it? Does it jack up your-

• 1:34:39Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, so they thought, so the way they used to get people to sleep was with benzos, like Valium, right? And turns out, if you overdose on those, you quit breathing and you die. And they're super hard to get off of, right? That's what happened to Jordan Peters. Like, super hard to get off of. So they found these Z drugs, so-

• 1:35:00Speaker 01

  GABA is this neuropeptide that basically slows neurons down, right? So when you're, when you go to sleep, uh, one of the primary things that's happening asleep is your neocortex. So the part of the brain that you think of as the human brain, the wrinkly bit, uh, that's where like all your motor function is, all your sensory and all your processing of that. Like your interpretation of, of the world, that's how you interact with the world, was that part, right?

• 1:35:25Speaker 01

  So that, that slows down and you quit interacting with the world, quit paying attention. Your senses still work, obviously, right? Cause I can turn on the light and your eyes still sense the light and you'll wake up, right? I can make a loud noise, so your, all your senses are still working, you're just not paying attention to them. So GABA is the primary neuropeptide that's making that happen. So pharmaceutical industry, the way they work is like, well, if we figure out this one step of this process, then we can supercharge that step, right? So now this is going to bind a GABA receptor, but it's going to do a hundred times more than GABA does.

• 1:36:01Speaker 01

  And that was benzos. And then the Z drugs were like a thousand times what GABA does. What's a Z? I don't know. Just like another brand name or another, another form? That's a category. So that's like, uh, Ambien and Lunesta, and there used to be a third one. I can't remember what it is. And these are like a thousand times? That's a thousand times the effect of GABA. So what was happening is it's just dissociating people. So, so they would take this and basically they quit interpreting their senses, but they could still be awake. And so the reason they were getting sued is people were like driving down and doing lizard brain stuff. They're driving down, picking up prostitutes. They're driving down and eating, you know, Oh God. $50, $100 worth of fast food.

• 1:36:45Speaker 01

  They're going to Vegas and gambling their life savings away and mortgaging their house and, and wake up the next day down here and remember it. They have no recollection of it whatsoever. And so that's what they start, that's what they're getting sued for. Is it somewhat addictive too, Ambien? It is for this reason. So.

• 1:37:03Speaker 01

  So yeah, the first thing that happens, obviously, the blue light goes out of our eyes, that change, that makes some changes in our brain, and act, and melatonin gets secreted, everybody's heard of that, this, it's a, it's a hormone in your brain, and that's like the initiation of everything, right, that's the, as Matt Walker calls it, the starter pistol, which I think is a great metaphor, so that initiates everything, and one of the primary things that happens is GABA comes in and slows down the brain, you quit paying attention to your environment, your body temperature goes down, and like, that's what makes you feel sleepy, so, if, your, your body's a really smart machine, right, it's efficient, it's not gonna do anything it doesn't need to do, that's why if I give you testosterone, you quit making testosterone, why the hell are you gonna

• 1:37:48Speaker 01

  spend energy making it, you're getting it for free, so, if I give you GABA, and it's having a thousand times the effect of GABA, or I'm sorry, if I give you a Z-drug, it's having a thousand times the effect of GABA, all the receptors for GABA, we only need one one thousandth of them, right, cuz you have all, you have all of this frickin' GABA everywhere, it's like, you don't need all these receptors, you know, so, what happens is you down-regulate receptors, and now, you quit taking that, you're GABA deficient, no matter how much GABA you have in your brain, cuz you need a thousand times what you would ordinarily have just to be normal now, because you have so few receptors, and then the receptors take six to eight weeks to come back, nobody can wait six to eight

• 1:38:33Speaker 01

  weeks to start sleeping again, right, so, they get, they're really hard to get off of, too.

• 1:38:38Jocko Willink?

  Sure, that's why the Ambien becomes addictive.

• 1:38:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, people can't quit it, because it's just making them normal, it's the same thing when people take, you know, 50mg, or even 10mg of melatonin, it's like, your brain only makes about six micrograms from the time the sun goes down until you wake up, you're taking 10mg all at once. Way more than you're and you're going to down regulate receptors. And now when you quit taking melatonin, you're melatonin deficient because you don't have enough receptors.

• 1:39:05Jocko Willink?

  How long does it take to get back to where you're producing melatonin again?

• 1:39:08Speaker 01

  Well, you're still producing it. It's just like you're producing a normal amount with maybe a tenth or one one hundredth of the receptors. So you're deficient because you need both. It doesn't matter how much.

• 1:39:17Jocko Willink?

  Do you get them back eventually?

• 1:39:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, it takes like six to eight weeks. You know, SSRIs are very similar. Like they're working on serotonin reuptake and they're working on receptors and it takes like six to eight weeks to really start working and takes six to eight weeks to recover from.

• 1:39:33Jocko Willink?

  And guys that do testosterone, you, you, do you ever start making that again if you go on, if you're on testosterone?

• 1:39:41Speaker 01

  It depends on how long you're on and what you do while you're on it. Right? So there are things that you can do to maintain testicular volume and function.

• 1:39:51Speaker 01

  Most dock in the box guys don't do this. You know, they're just like, here's with testosterone. And then, and most of the, most of the guys that I end up seeing, you know, they're, they're being seen by some guy who's giving them like two or 300 milligrams once a week or once every two weeks. So it's getting like this huge surge. They're going super physiologic for a few days.

• 1:40:13Jocko Willink?

  They turn into a caveman for like two days.

• 1:40:14Speaker 01

  And then they down regulate their receptors and that testosterone gets converted into estrogen and estrogen is the signal in your brain to tell your brain how much testosterone you have. So if your estrogen's high, your brain assumes that's from testosterone. So now you quit producing as much testosterone. And so they get this peak. Now they down regulate their receptors, right? And they down regulate their own production. And so after a few months of that, once all the receptors have changed and all the physiology has changed, now they're super physiologic for maybe a day or two and they're normal for a day or two. And now they're low the whole rest of the time. Some guys, that's two weeks. And so they'll always come in and be

• 1:40:53Speaker 01

  like, hey, I started this and I felt great. And now I feel just like I did before I started. And I'll say, How much are you taking? How often are they? Are they looking at your DHT? Are they looking at your estrogen? Are they looking at your sex hormone binding globulin? Are they looking like, are they looking at anything other than your testosterone? Are they even looking at your free testosterone? Because total testosterone really doesn't matter. How much of it is available? And so like, this is true with every hormone. Anything, anything, any hormone I give you, you're gonna quit making it. Now, there are things that I can, there's things I can give you that will cause you to keep making testosterone while you're taking testosterone. It's not

• 1:41:35Speaker 01

  perfect. But those guys that can come off of testosterone probably be okay. They're, they're still gonna be bad off, right? Because they, they weren't able to make enough when I met them. So now they're gonna be a little worse than that when they get off. And so like what I was doing with the team guys is I was first doing it with like all supplements. First I was getting guys to sleep and getting them off of the Ambien, right? And that's, that just came from me. And I couldn't just say quit taking your Ambien. Because our, you know, our community, one is good, two's better, and three's probably great. So they're taking like three Ambien with So they're taking seven? Yeah, they're taking three Ambien with like a couple of cocktails. And then they're waking up at 4:30, not intentionally, you know, they're waking up at four, 4:30, and they're like, can't

• 1:42:20Speaker 01

  go back to sleep. So I'm gonna go into the gym. I'm gonna work out really hard today. I'm not gonna take any breaks. I'm gonna work all day. When I come home tonight, I'm gonna be tired and I'll go to sleep. Like, all right, how long have you been doing that? Like, three years. Keep going. Like, tonight's the night, I think, right? Like, obviously, obviously, it's not working, right? And so, like, once I learned how Ambien destroys REM sleep, like 80% of REM sleep goes away, and it knocks out about 20% of deep sleep. Alcohol is exactly the opposite. So destroys deep sleep, gets rid of about 20. So when I sent these guys in for sleep studies, 99.9% stage two sleep. So they weren't getting any deep sleep, any REM sleep. Do they wake up in the morning and feel like shit?

• 1:43:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. How do they even, I don't even know how they survived it, honestly. Like, and that's one of the things about medicine proves to you how little we know, because That should kill them. It should kill them in a couple of weeks because that's the same as getting no sleep, you would think. But this is what, you know, the Ambien lawsuits kind of were fortunately out to where I could learn all that. And so I couldn't just take away their Ambien and alcohol and say suck it up buttercup, right? Like I had to give them something. So I did some research and came up with a bunch of things and they were having to go to all the, it's pre-amazons. They're having to drive around to three different stores and get all the ingredients and try to travel with it and it was a pain. And so, they really have rang me into making a product out of it to make it easier for them. So I,

• 1:43:49Speaker 01

  you know, I figured out that sleep was a huge component and that that was causing probably a lot of their low testosterone. And then there's things I can give you like the precursors to testosterone, like DHEA. And you can do a form of DHEA, seven keto DHEA that can't be converted into estrogen. So that's good, right? I can give you zinc citrate, which will decrease the amount of estrogen you make from your testosterone. And then like some guys, I was giving a pharmaceutical called a Remidex and that blocks estrogen conversion too. It's called a aromatase inhibitor. And so just with like DHEA, pregnenolone,

• 1:44:33Speaker 01

  which is another precursor to the testosterone pathway, and some zinc or Remidex and getting guys to sleep, guys were tripling, quadrupling their testosterone levels over six months, 46 months, right? Yeah, I, one of the CEOs out there, he got like, in the couple of years I was treating him, he had like three PRs, like, like weightlifting and running and like something else. And like in his 40s, like this is the best he's ever been in his life because he's, you know, he's been broken down.

• 1:45:11Speaker 01

  We and like our community has some of that just because of the chaotic sleep anyway, right? Just because, well, tonight you're working and then tomorrow you're working too. And then, you know, and now we're going to travel and we're going to go over here, we're going to do this. And like, and so every like, you sleep when you can, obviously, right? And so it's chaotic. And if you aren't aligned with your circadian rhythm, sleep is nowhere near as valuable. And so I got, I got guys sleeping and they had huge performance gains. There are a few older guys that I couldn't get them to make enough testosterone to be in an upper quintile. So I think when they, they, they like shut me down and had me under

• 1:45:52Speaker 01

  investigation for a while. And like, I mean, I essentially sacrificed my career for like, there was no way I was getting any kind of Navy residency or anything because I, I was just in trouble all the time with BUMED or the hospital or WarCom, whatever, like everybody's, then even like my What were they mad about? That I was practicing outside of my scope, that I was, like, I was giving people, it's called Myers cocktails when I thought that it was adrenal fatigue, IV vitamins. Apparently, I'm not allowed to do that as a doctor. And I got in a lot of trouble for that. The Oremadex,

• 1:46:34Speaker 01

  ignorant doctors will say, it's a cancer drug. Why are you giving somebody a cancer drug? It's not a cancer drug, you moron. I mean, you give it to women with breast cancer because their breast cancer is estrogen sensitive and you want them to make less estrogen. That has nothing to do with cancer. Like, you just don't want them to have estrogen. It's an, it's an estrogen blocker. That's all it is. So yeah, I, I just, like, everything I did, you know, and, and all it takes, because I was a junior doctor, right? Like, all it takes is for somebody senior to me, anywhere in the medical chain, be like, he's doing what? Why is he doing that? Like, no, we can't allow that. And so then they call WarCom and complain that this rogue doctor is doing all this crazy voodoo stuff. That's what it's

• 1:47:16Speaker 01

  called, like voodoo. And when, even when I, when I told the leadership, Andrew, or

• 1:47:25Speaker 01

  Crongar, Alex Crongar, he was the Commodore at the time and he was super receptive. He's smart, educated on all this stuff, but everybody else like literally laughed me out of their office going, you gotta be kidding me.

• 1:47:43Speaker 01

  Their testosterone's low because they aren't sleeping, right doc, like you got some problems. And, but then I started getting results and people started performing better and word of mouth spread. And then they started having me lecture at the pre and post retreats. And then, you know, that's when I like was sharing the stage with like Rob Wolf and Wellborn and Cresser and like all those guys. And then they started inviting me on podcasts and inviting me to other symposiums and stuff. And like, that's kind of where my career went because of what I was doing with our, with our guys.

• 1:48:17Jocko Willink?

  So what, what year did you end up getting out of the Navy?

• 1:48:20Speaker 01

  January 13.

• 1:48:21Jocko Willink?

  So you retired from the Navy on January 13?

• 1:48:23Speaker 01

  I didn't retire, but I got, you know, 19 years.

• 1:48:27Jocko Willink?

  Are you serious?

• 1:48:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:48:29Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Bro.

• 1:48:31Speaker 01

  Well, so, but medical school is like the academy. So it only counts retro. So you have to do 24 years to retire. So I would have had to stay in five more years.

• 1:48:42Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 1:48:42Speaker 01

  And there was, there was nowhere for me to go. I mean, I was going to end up in Antarctica or something like, yeah. I'd burned, I'd burned a lot of bridges to do what I did. Yeah.

• 1:48:51Jocko Willink?

  So then what'd you do when you punched out? So you kind of had.

• 1:48:53Speaker 01

  I went and worked at the concierge practice in Point Loma with the doctor who talked me into becoming a doctor. And then he wanted me to succeed him in that practice and take it over. And it was exactly what I thought I wanted, you know? And I was already doing some private consulting, like people heard me on podcasts and be like, hey, I want to work with you. So it's sort of telemedicine, like Zoom stuff, Skype in those days, I guess. And so I was doing some of that and then, but of course, when I left, I created like this vacuum because the next guy who came to the teams was just like. A doctor, like a regular doctor is just waiting, biding his time.

• 1:49:32Jocko Willink?

  Do you try and do like a turnover of what you had learned with him?

• 1:49:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, but.

• 1:49:36Jocko Willink?

  But he was like, I want to stay in the Navy?

• 1:49:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, after seeing what happened to me, there wasn't anybody who's going to be interested in doing what I'd done.

• 1:49:44Jocko Willink?

  Has the world caught up with these protocols?

• 1:49:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, like I'd say maybe four or five years after I got out, like SOCOM hired me to come and lecture there and like lecture all their medical staff. And like damn Nick hired me to come in, do a lecture and teach all their medical staff. And I, I consulted on all those guys on a fairly regular basis.

• 1:50:05Jocko Willink?

  BH Liddell Hart, who wrote the book called, he wrote a bunch, he wrote countless books, but you know, he's a, he's a world war one guy fought at the some. And he, he wrote the book that I love called The Indirect Approach. But one of the things he says in that book is the first person with an idea, if they stick with that idea and they hold on to it, guess what they'd become? A martyr. So you look out through, throughout history, like if you have an idea and you, you're like, hey, this is the way it should be. You, you end up a martyr. And that's kind of like what happened to you because it, it takes a while for ideas to get accepted. He rolls out this one example of with the major changes that have been made to warships over the past, whatever it is, 200 years.

• 1:50:48Jocko Willink?

  Every major change that came, like no one accepted it until like somebody got martyred. And then, you know, like going from, uh, whatever, from sail to like steam. You know, those first guys were like, are you an idiot? What are you going to do when you're out at sea and there's no coal? You're an idiot. Like we can sail forever. And sure enough, these guys get fired and then the next guy says, you know, we should make the holes out of, uh, out of metal instead of wood. Were you an idiot? How are you going to repair those things?

• 1:51:16Speaker 01

  Metal's heavier than mortar.

• 1:51:18Jocko Willink?

  All those things. And that's what happened. So if you're the, if you're the first person to roll out, if you're not careful, no, you can be careful and you can get it done. In a more, this is what he talks about.

• 1:51:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:51:28Jocko Willink?

  A more indirect manner. So if you had said, all right, I'm going to be like super strategic and I'm going to run this up the chain, it would have taken longer. You'd had to, you had to tell a bunch of guys, I can't do anything for you now. You know, it would have taken you seven years or whatever. So I'm not saying it would have been, it's just that, that indirect approach is how, is the only way to, well, not the only way, but it's probably the only way to avoid becoming a martyr. But for you, you're sitting there looking at people that are hurting and you're like, all right, I'm going to help these guys.

• 1:51:54Speaker 01

  Guys need help right now. Like it's totally, totally worth it. Like I, I was fully aware of what I was doing. I'm not, I'm not whining about it. Like I knew what I was doing at the time. I had a, I had a quote taped to my monitor from Buckminster Fuller. It said, it said, uh, never fight the system. Create a superior system to make the old one obsolete. And so I was like, that's something I do. I'm just going to do the right thing. Cause like, I learned all this stuff from other people, right? It's not like I invented.

• 1:52:23Jocko Willink?

  Right.

• 1:52:23Speaker 01

  What I was doing. Um, I mean, I had a few novel ideas, but for the most part, like I learned all this from other people. So this was going on in the world. It just wasn't going on in our world. And now it's in our world. Like, you know, but I left this vacuum when I left. And so all these guys kept coming to me, like when they got, when they got out especially. And I don't know if you, uh, do you, do you know anything about the honor, the honor foundation?

• 1:52:49Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I definitely know about it. Yeah, for sure.

• 1:52:52Speaker 01

  So Joe Musselman.

• 1:52:53Jocko Willink?

  I've spoken there a couple of times.

• 1:52:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. So Joe Musselman was the guy who founded that. He's a guy that didn't make it through BUDs. And, uh, he wanted to do this educational component of it. And I'd seen enough team guys like, these guys need a medical rehab that year too, right? So like educate them for a year, but like, let's get them in medical shape first so that they can actually learn. So they can remember, they can sleep, they can, right? Uh, and so they're not emotional wrecks and, you know, racked with anxiety and all this, and all this other stuff. And so, um, we pitched, that's how I got back and involved with,

• 1:53:28Speaker 01

  Dr. Rice, the guy who talked to me in medical schools. He had this great clinic in Point Loma. It's huge. And he had very few patients. And, uh, so he had the clinical space and we were like, So we pitched them like, hey, man, could we run like this pilot program through here? And we were trying to raise money for that and the money just wasn't there for the medical because it's too expensive, but we did like, I think we did like 10 families, like team guys family or something, proof of concept. And so, and then I, and then I ended up working at the clinic instead of just doing, but my plan was to do that, like to build that. Because all, everybody was calling me anyways, all the team guys were calling me anyway.

• 1:54:08Speaker 01

  And they still to this day, like I'm always managing 50 guys. And you, one, they trust me, two, I, I know our community better than anybody and I, I know what they need, I know what their problems are before they even know what their problems are. And so I was, like, that's kind of been my philanthropic work. It's just like I just kept. Do you do that for civilians as well? I do it for civilians and they pay me. They pay me a lot so that I don't have to charge the team guys. And up until just recently, like I'm, I'm on a bunch of different advisory boards for the nonprofits who are trying to help our guys out.

• 1:54:50Speaker 01

  And so I've never charged any of the team guys for my time, but they have to pay for their meds because they're not, you know, it's not coming through TRICARE. And so now a lot of these foundations are paying for their meds. And so in the last couple of years, like it's, it's gotten a lot better, you know? And there, there's even, I haven't seen any, but there's other doctors that are doing this work with these foundations and they're, they're treating some active duty guys too. So. And then you ended up making your, your sleep supplement too. Yeah, so actually when I was, when I was at the, I was at the clinic, I was at the concierge clinic.

• 1:55:31Speaker 01

  His life wellness, by the way, give him a shout out, maybe.

• 1:55:34Jocko Willink?

  Life Wellness in Point Loma, still active, still rolling?

• 1:55:36Speaker 01

  Still there, yeah. Life Wellness Institute, I think it's called. And, you know, so I worked there for a year and, I mean, I just, I just had so much, there's so much demand for my time and like, there's no way I could do what I needed to do. The team still hadn't caught up. They still aren't doing anything about sleep. And so the guys were just kind of harrying me into like, dude, just make a product. Like, how hard is this to do? I'm like, alright, like I'll, so I'm like, I'm gonna step away from the clinic for a year. I'm gonna start the sleep supplement. I'll just live off of my consulting. And I think I was doing an hourly rate back then. I do like annual programs now, but I, I said, I'll just live off of my consulting. I'll start this thing up and

• 1:56:21Speaker 01

  I'm gonna go back and.

• 1:56:22Jocko Willink?

  So your consulting is, is this medical consulting for individual humans?

• 1:56:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Okay. So, I mean, I do, like, I do some organizational stuff, like, they'll, like, whatever, law enforcement or professional sports teams, whatever, they'll hire me to lecture and kind of help them design a program.

• 1:56:39Jocko Willink?

  But you're talking about like, hey, I want you to help me feel better.

• 1:56:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:56:43Jocko Willink?

  And so here's my money.

• 1:56:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. So now I have, now, now I do annual programs. People can only do a year. Like, I won't, I don't do multiple years. Like, I'm gonna teach you everything you need to know in a year. You have to have another doctor, because I'm not, I'm not your primary care doctor. Yeah. You had a cold, you had a broken leg, like, that's not me. So I, and, and what I do is performance. Like, I didn't break, I didn't call it that at the teams, but if you think about it, that's exactly what it's doing. It's performance, right? Like, none of these guys had a disease. They just weren't performing like they felt like they should perform. And so, so that, that's what I do now. And so, it's mainly like, you know, big executives or entrepreneurs. Traded their health for wealth for 20 or 30 years.

• 1:57:27Speaker 01

  And now they had like a big exit, whatever, like, you know, they sold their company. They got a hundred million dollars. They don't care about money. They want to buy that health back. They want that health back. They want to be division one athletes again. I'm like, pump the brakes, Sparky. Like, maybe we can get you, we can drop 40 pounds of fat off you in a year. And get you back into being able to be physical and, you know, yeah. So, uh, so, yeah, I, I, I charged those guys a lot of money, wanted to make sure that they're motivated and, uh, two, just, uh, pay for me to treat team guys. And then like right before, I'd say like a year before I got out, I was at a conference where,

• 1:58:04Speaker 01

  uh, a guy was lecturing on TBI and I had at least one guy I knew that had TBI because that's, this is what we thought about TBIs in those time. So, you know, if somebody hadn't been knocked unconscious, then you didn't think they had a TBI. Um, so then I, I went to this guy's lecture and he was working with pugilists and,

• 1:58:25Speaker 01

  and some NFL guys. He starts throwing up his case reports and like looking at their blood markers. I'm like, that looks exactly like my guys. You're kidding me. So then I started doing my own research and in 2009, there was a JAMA article written and it was done, between Cambridge and Harvard, thousands of people. And, uh, they, they had these imaging called DTIs and it's like, it's so, it's so, uh, the resolution is so clear, they can see a single neuronal tract breaking. And they call that a minor TBI. So they're like, what's the threshold? It turns out it was 1.09Gs. They got that from the.

• 1:59:10Speaker 01

  1.09Gs can cause. A minor TBI. A minor TBI. They were getting that from the acceleration changes on a roller coaster. And I'm like, I wonder how much our stuff is. So I started investigating like, yeah, and this stuff we've tested, like, we haven't tested everything, obviously, but, um, you know, that they're like the fat, like damn next fast boots.

• 1:59:32Speaker 01

  They average 60Gs for hours. They peak over 100Gs.

• 1:59:37Speaker 01

  So they're just like boom, head injury, head injury, head injury, like every frickin' wave, right? And then I started learning about overpressurization TPI, right? It's gonna be great. And so I don't know what the threshold is for that, but it's something close to that one point, right? Well, if you're, if you're in a concrete room with three and fours, like every round that comes out is 30 Gs.

• 2:00:09Speaker 01

  If you're shooting a Carl Gustaf, the shooter gets 200 Gs, the spotter gets like 300 Gs. You know, the, you know, hard parachute openings are two to three Gs. Being in the back of a Humvee with a 50 cal gun is like 60 Gs every, every round. You know, so I'm like, well, I don't have a guy who doesn't have thousands of TBIs. And this has now been proven. And if you know Lark and Frank Lark and, you know, his son suicided and he had his brain analyzed. And so when you look at, if you, you look at fighters and look at NFL's, NFL guys, they

• 2:00:51Speaker 01

  have the CT, right? You've heard of that. And it's like specific regions of the brain that's shows some specific abnormalities. What happens in the, in the overpressurization is like that pressure wave goes through your skull, right? It goes right through your skull. And then they have it on photography now, like, I guess it's a lot of frames per second or so, 60 frames per second or something. I can slow that down and get really resolute with it. So as the, as the wave comes by, it's just like any other wave. It's moving, it's having impact on the material that's going through. Well, the different densities move at different rates.

• 2:01:31Speaker 01

  So the lining of your brain, the dura, that moves at a different rate than the vasculature. And that moves at a different rate than the white matter. And that moves at a different rate than the gray matter. And that moves at a different rate than the little vesicles that hold the cerebral spinal fluid.

• 2:01:45Jocko Willink?

  So just put it in a blender.

• 2:01:47Speaker 01

  So you just shear everything. And we have, and when you do autopsies on our guys who suicided, their entire brain is covered with these tau proteins, like these markers for damage at every interface. So where, where the vasculature meets the brain, where the dura meets the brain, where the white matter meets the gray matter, where the gray matter meets the cerebral spinal fluid. The entire brain. And we don't know what to do about that. Now there's peptides out that we know help. That's going to be the next, that's the next frontier of medicine, I believe. And that's where I'm spending a lot of my time with our guys now. Hyperbarics helps for sure. Hormones obviously help.

• 2:02:29Speaker 01

  So, you know, that, that's, you know, that's, that's what our guys need, but this needs to be done proactively. Cause you think about it like over time, the equipment just keeps getting more and more dynamic. The people inside the equipment are the same, right? We're the fragile bit now.

• 2:02:49Jocko Willink?

  And there's gotta be like, it's different for different people. You know, I always bring up George Foreman and Muhammad Ali. Like George Foreman, right now, he's up there, you know, totally good to go.

• 2:02:58Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:02:58Jocko Willink?

  And I've known a lot of fighters and some fighters are just like, they're fine.

• 2:03:03Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:03:03Jocko Willink?

  And some guys are not clearly. And it's the same thing with football. Like you meet guys that played football their whole life and then they went out and they're doing totally normal things. And other guys get totally messed up from football. So there's gotta be some genetic component to it as well, right?

• 2:03:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's, there's genetic variation to everything, right? So, and I don't know why anybody's surprised by this, right? It's like,

• 2:03:26Speaker 01

  You know, we'd like to say that all men are created equal. It's not true.

• 2:03:29Jocko Willink?

  This is not true.

• 2:03:29Speaker 01

  Like every, people aren't equal. Some people have aptitudes that other people don't have. You know, it's like this, uh, this, this misnomer of the super sleeper, right? If you have this gene combination, then you don't need as much sleep. It's not true. You know, what, what's true is that you don't suffer as much as most people when you don't sleep. Right? When you shorts, when you short sleep, you don't have the same problems as the average Joe. Now there's somebody on the other side of the spectrum too. That you take a few hours of sleep away and they're completely incapacitated. These are people who don't make it through hell week. These are people who don't make it into our community.

• 2:04:04Jocko Willink?

  I've always, well, you know, people always talk about my sleep and I, the genetic component I talk about because like my oldest daughter. I would be going to bed at 11 o'clock at night when she was in high school and she'd be up studying.

• 2:04:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:04:17Jocko Willink?

  And I'd wake up at 4:30 in the morning and she'd be up studying. And, and so she was just kinda like me, right? She didn't need a ton of sleep. My wife, like this girl's going to bed. Yeah. I mean, she's going to bed and like she'll be up later.

• 2:04:34Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 2:04:34Jocko Willink?

  My, my middle daughter, if there's not an emergency going on, she's in, she's, she's gonna get out of bed when she feels like it. Like there's not major emergency going on. My son's kinda like, uh, he can, he can deal without sleep pretty well. And then my youngest daughter is like my wife. So it seems to me like, and you know, we all live in the same house.

• 2:04:55Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:04:56Jocko Willink?

  There's like, half of us get up early and are going to do something. The other half are still in bed. And that's the way it is every day. And it's not because I treated them any differently.

• 2:05:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:05:05Jocko Willink?

  I wanted them all to get up early and some of them just, it's not part of their gig.

• 2:05:08Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:05:09Jocko Willink?

  Uh, it's not part of my wife's gig either. People, people say to me like, how do you get up in the morning? Like without waking up your wife? My wife ain't waking up unless I've started firing weapons in the bedroom. Like I'm good to go. That girl is, she's out and she's in her own little la la land, which is awesome. So it seems like there is some level of genetic component to it where, and you know, this even happened in the teams. Like I would, I definitely a hundred percent like I wouldn't need to sleep with. At all. And guys would be like, hey, I need to go down. And I'd be like, cool. Yeah, go to sleep. And I I could go for a really long time without, you know, on very little sleep. And I've always been like that.

• 2:05:46Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:05:47Jocko Willink?

  And so there's, there's gotta be some level of like, and I'm not claiming to be like, oh, I have some genetic gift, but there's something where it's like, oh, I can get by a little bit less, you know?

• 2:05:55Speaker 01

  We, we can test your genetics and see if you're one of the super sleepers.

• 2:05:58Jocko Willink?

  I, I, I wouldn't be surprised if I was, and I wouldn't be surprised if I wasn't, you know?

• 2:06:02Speaker 01

  Yeah. It, it's super rare. It's like the, everybody wants to put themselves in that category and be like, well, I'm just a, right? And I'm not saying that, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not saying this is you, but um.

• 2:06:12Jocko Willink?

  Well, I just kinda did that. So I guess I'm guilty. But no, I actually don't think I really am.

• 2:06:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:06:17Jocko Willink?

  I don't think I really am. I think I, I think, you know.

• 2:06:19Speaker 01

  I, I think the odds of being that is something like being struck by lightning while being attacked by a shark. Right? It's like, I mean, it's, it's super, super rare.

• 2:06:28Jocko Willink?

  But I, I go to sleep.

• 2:06:29Speaker 01

  But think about it like anything else. Like, how much do you suffer from a ruck? Like, you know, you're gonna go to whatever, 10, 20 mile ruck. Like, how much are you gonna suffer? Does everybody suffer the same?

• 2:06:40Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:40Speaker 01

  No.

• 2:06:40Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:41Speaker 01

  Right? How much weight can you lift? The same as everybody else? Like, if you train the same, like, if you, like, yeah, how many, how fast can you read? How much do you retain? Like, everybody's different in everything.

• 2:06:49Jocko Willink?

  How much sleep do people need?

• 2:06:51Speaker 01

  Eight hours.

• 2:06:53Jocko Willink?

  So like, I, if, if I go to sleep, I can't sleep eight hours. Like, I will not sleep eight hours.

• 2:07:00Speaker 01

  And not because of.

• 2:07:00Jocko Willink?

  How many do you sleep? I could have been at 10:30, wake up at 4:30. Like, that's kinda all.

• 2:07:06Speaker 01

  Seven hours.

• 2:07:07Jocko Willink?

  Six hours.

• 2:07:08Speaker 01

  Six hours.

• 2:07:09Jocko Willink?

  Six hours.

• 2:07:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:07:10Jocko Willink?

  And sometimes I go to bed at 10, you know, like, there's six and a half hours. But, you know, if I'm, it's hard for me to sleep. Like, I'll, I'll be in some situation where, you know, whatever, I'm go, I, my, my wife and I go stay somewhere, whatever. And we have, we, there's, you know, no, uh, what is it?

• 2:07:28Jocko Willink?

  There's nothing to do, right? We're on vacation, for lack of a better word. Echo Charles. We're cruising. We're cruising. And like, I'll go to bed and it's so annoying because, you know, like, like then I'm awake, we're in some random place and my wife's gonna sleep for more, four more hours right now. You know, and I'm like walking around in circles doing burpees in my room.

• 2:07:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:07:45Jocko Willink?

  So, yeah, it'd be interesting. You know what? You know what else was an interesting sleep experiment? The ARG. Did you ever do an ARG platoon?

• 2:07:53Speaker 01

  No.

• 2:07:53Jocko Willink?

  So ARG.

• 2:07:53Speaker 01

  I narrowly avoided one.

• 2:07:55Jocko Willink?

  You go out on a ship and when you're out on a ship, you have no job. As a SEAL, you have no job and you're in this weird compartment where it's just dark if you, you know, guys. And we had guys, I had a guy in one of my platoons, um, he would sleep for days. I, I like, seriously. And, and he was also a guy that probably had some kind of a sleep disorder because he would fall asleep on patrol. Like we'd, we'd be patrolling and, you know, take a 10 minute break, you know, patrol for 50 minutes, break for 10, patrol for 50 minutes, break for 10. We'd be doing a hump across the desert. We'd, we'd sit down.

• 2:08:27Speaker 01

  Was he an older guy?

• 2:08:28Jocko Willink?

  No, no, no. Um, he, he lives in Texas. I'll introduce you to him. But he, uh, we'd, we'd like take a break and you know, you're like freaking sore, you're humping through the desert, you're thirsty. And all three minutes in the break, you'd hear like, and he'd be snoring.

• 2:08:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:08:45Jocko Willink?

  But he would go on the ship. He would go on the ship. He, sometimes he slept for like actual, like, like 18 hours, you know? And then he'd get up looking all groggy. And so on the ship, you could sleep as much as you possibly could want. I mean, there's nothing to do.

• 2:09:00Speaker 01

  Like sub ops or something.

• 2:09:01Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, sub op, same way. Even if you're the most like highly disciplined person and you're trying to complete your degree and you're learning to play guitar and you're working out, you still have like an extra 17 hours to do nothing.

• 2:09:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:09:13Jocko Willink?

  So, but even on the ARG, it was like, I could sleep, but I, and I didn't really think about sleep too much, but I like, you, I'd go to sleep and then just wake up like, okay, well, I'm going to do whatever.

• 2:09:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, there's several genes to that. I, I wouldn't be surprised if you have some of them. I, I'm, I'm a guy who. Can get away with it without much sleep as well. It's not as true now. It's not true now. Like the older you get, the harder it is.

• 2:09:37Jocko Willink?

  Bro, my freaking old neighbor, Vietnam dude, this, this dude, like I'd wake up in the morning, he'd be sitting out on his porch.

• 2:09:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:09:45Jocko Willink?

  He, he's like, I don't sleep. I don't need to sleep. I'm watching the neighborhood. He'd tell me. I'd be like, right, all man.

• 2:09:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it, it's, there's, there's variation. Like when, when I was in, I mean, obviously the whole time I was in college, uh, the whole time I was in medical school, like, cause I had a marriage and I have kids, you know, and like I'm coming home from medical school. I'm like making dinner for my kids, you know, giving them baths or eating them to sleep.

• 2:10:10Jocko Willink?

  Just sleep deprivation.

• 2:10:11Speaker 01

  Like, and I was sleeping five hours a night on a good night for 10 years.

• 2:10:18Speaker 01

  Now though, part of its age, but part of its, and it wasn't until I figured this out for the team guys that I said, well, maybe I should apply this shit to myself, right? So I started sleeping more. And now I, now I'm really bad at functioning without sleep. Like I got used to it. Um, and I think you kind of, the, and the, the thing about sleep, like one of the things it makes, and then obviously I don't just do sleep, but sleep's a big component of what I do. Um, just because it's the most important factor of your health.

• 2:10:51Speaker 01

  If I do my job, well, first of all, the sales pitch sucks because what is sleep good for? Everything. Like what's the worst thing you can say in marketing is like, it fixes anything. Like every, you're better at everything when you sleep well. You're smarter, you're faster, you're stronger, you're smarter, uh, you're better looking. Like everything, everything's better. Lower stress hormones, higher anabolic hormones, better appetite regulation. Everything's better when you sleep. And so that's a terrible sales pitch. Now the other thing is like, if I do my job really well and you sleep amazingly well, you won't remember it at all. I'm like, no, trust me. It was great for you. And like, you know, now at least you have wearables and you have people tracking their sleep and something like there's some,

• 2:11:33Speaker 01

  you know, there, there's something to make it a little easier for me in that, in that respect, but, um, like there's, I mean, there's no question that's the most important aspect of your life. And the big problem, the other big problem with sleep is that. When you so like the whole point of me going to sleep tonight is to repair everything that I did to myself today, right? Everything that every fuel source I exhausted that needs to be replenished or any damage I've done, that needs to be fixed. And then I need to you store things and organize things and set hormone regulation for tomorrow. So I'm repairing from today and preparing for tomorrow. Well, it takes eight hours to recover from 16 hours.

• 2:12:14Speaker 01

  Vast majority of the time, let's say 95% of people on the planet are that way, 98% of the people may be that way. If I only sleep six hours instead of eight hours, tomorrow still comes, right? If I didn't repair and prepare 100%, how do I do tomorrow, right? Where am I going to get the energy from? Well, I'm going to get that from stress hormones. That's going to increase and stress hormones are catabolic. If you think about it, if I went to sleep and I could repair 100% and prepare 100% for tomorrow, I would never age. Right? I'd be exactly the same every day. I'd wake up exactly the same every day. There would be no aging involved. The fact that I can't is the reason I age. If I decide

• 2:12:56Speaker 01

  to cut away 25% of my sleep on purpose, I'm choosing to age 25% faster if I'm somebody who's capable of sleeping eight hours, right? And like you said, like not everybody is. And some of that's learned, some of that's Yeah, I might just be like habitually. Right. And like I had a 80, well, she was in her late 70s at the time, a client, like probably 10 years ago. And she's like, I haven't slept more than four hours in 20 years. And I was like, that's not good for you. So I get her like just sleep hygiene and just my sleep supplement, no drugs, no hormones, not like, just like nutritional supplements and sleep hygiene ritual around sleep. Start sleeping eight hours a night.

• 2:13:42Speaker 01

  As far as I know, she still is, you know, I haven't talked to her in a few years.

• 2:13:45Jocko Willink?

  And she feel better? She just feel like she's wasting half one quarter of her day?

• 2:13:48Speaker 01

  No, she, she. So, so, so here, here, this, this is true about everything I do. So everything performance based. So I get people to sleep. I get people to eat right. Get people to exercise right. I get people to control their stress. Get their hormones in order. I get their inflammation down with peptides or whatever.

• 2:14:05Speaker 01

  And they come to me like, oh my God, I didn't realize how bad I was until I felt good. And that's like a month into her and then another month later, oh, no, no, now I feel like I used to feel like now. And then it takes like three or four months of like really good behavior to realize how much you've lost because our awareness, like I said, our awareness of sleep isn't there. That's the whole idea of it, right? We're not paying attention to that. But our self-awareness of how impaired we are, just like a drunk person. And the research has been done over and over again. I deprive you of this much sleep. I give you this many alcohol drinks. Your blood alcohol level is this. You haven't slept this much. Same thing, like correlates exactly.

• 2:14:49Jocko Willink?

  I, I just like, that's so hard for me to understand.

• 2:14:52Speaker 01

  It, it does plateau.

• 2:14:53Jocko Willink?

  I like the, here's an example of this. So we do an event at Esalen Front called The Muster. And it's a big event. And when we first started doing it, I'll talk about the second one that we did was in New York City. It's, you know, there's 900 people coming. There's all this stuff to get done. There's. And so, long story short, we, we, behind the scenes, we weren't as squared away as we should have been. So we had a bunch of stuff to do, preparing these big briefs, these slides to get ready. And we had to do all this stuff. And so Leif, who's doing it with me, I think it was like 1:30 in the morning and we're, the, the events, the next day, it's 1:30 in the morning, we're signing 900.

• 2:15:36Jocko Willink?

  Certificates of graduation, we're gonna wake up at 3:30 to go do PT. So we're onstage. I mean, I'm onstage with two hours of sleep.

• 2:15:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:15:45Jocko Willink?

  And I'm answering questions, I'm giving presentations, and that day is like, starts at, we get up at 3:30, we PT, we go 4:30, the group comes and PTs, we go, get up on stage, we do all day. Same thing the next day. The next day, we got other stuff we gotta do, we get no sleep. And like, and bro, I mean, we're, we're on operations. We used to, like, going on an operation, especially in Ramadi, you're planning, you're planning, planning, planning.

• 2:16:08Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:16:09Jocko Willink?

  Uh, and I'm saying, especially in Ramadi for me, because we would plan with the army, we gotta go check in, we've got Iraqis, we've got all the stuff going on. By the time we go in the field, we haven't slept.

• 2:16:17Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:16:18Jocko Willink?

  I remember being so happy to go in the field, because I can finally sleep for like, three hours.

• 2:16:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, under, under a bush on rocks and cactus.

• 2:16:26Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and so, I never, and look, I mean, I've been drunk before.

• 2:16:30Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:16:31Jocko Willink?

  And I wouldn't wanna, I wouldn't trust myself to get up on stage.

• 2:16:35Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:16:35Jocko Willink?

  And, and, you know, if I had, if I had, I think I could probably have four drinks. And still like, present at the muster, it'd be a little bit extra.

• 2:16:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:16:47Jocko Willink?

  But if you got me to like, six drinks, it'd be a different event, right? And it wouldn't be good.

• 2:16:53Jocko Willink?

  So that's a little bit, is that some kind of an exaggeration?

• 2:16:57Speaker 01

  Acutely, you can compensate, right? So if you think about,

• 2:17:03Speaker 01

  so, you know, you have the autonomic nervous system, right? You have the parasympathetic and sympathetic, and, and the maximal sympathetic output, we call fight or flight. Right? So when you get up into fight or flight, what happens? You become superhuman, right? Your pupils dilate, you start taking in a bigger field of vision, right? Your lungs expand, you start taking in more oxygen, your blood pressure goes up, your peripheral perfusion goes down, so if you get cut, you don't bleed to death, you know, your reflexes get faster, you release a bunch of glucose, you have more endurance, more strength, faster reflexes, like you're superhuman. You feel, you don't feel amazing, because you're scared, right? But you feel alive and ready, right? And you're like, so, like, you can react to everything faster. Why don't you run around like that all the time?

• 2:17:48Speaker 01

  Cause it's catabolic. You're using yourself as the fuel source to get away from the danger because it doesn't matter.

• 2:17:53Jocko Willink?

  So that's what I do in those events.

• 2:17:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. So it doesn't matter if you can digest your food. It doesn't matter if you can fight off infection. Doesn't matter because like you need to get away from this threat before any of that matters. So you're going to marshal a hundred percent of your resources into that. So that's what you're doing.

• 2:18:07Jocko Willink?

  You're digging into the well or whatever.

• 2:18:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're digging in. Now, if you recover from that.

• 2:18:11Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:12Speaker 01

  And believe me, like not a big deal.

• 2:18:13Jocko Willink?

  Like we have gone through great lengths like now at the muster, it's everything is just so well oiled. I mean, we're going to bed at like, you know, nine o'clock at night. We joke about it. We're like, all right. Eight thirty, I'm getting ready to go to bed. Like we, we, we love that. You know, it's this, this, this is to support what you're talking about. I know this a hundred percent. If I don't get, I actually, when I'm going to a, an event, like if I'm going to speak, I

• 2:18:42Jocko Willink?

  sleep a little bit less because it makes me more like engaged with what's happening. Even more emotional, like I will be more emotionally engaged. If I'm super well rested, I'm just kind of like, cool. Like everything's, everything's good. Um, and, and I'll tell you another thing that, well, you already mentioned it, like when I'm, if I'm eating like crap. Bro, my sleep, it's a disaster. I feel like crap, but the sleep is crap and that's a disaster. The other thing is when you talk about stress, I mean, I don't stress about a lot. Like even like, and I think it's getting, you know, you get used to in the teams like what, what, you know, I wrote about it in this book. Like what, what, you gotta know what to worry about. What's important and what's not important.

• 2:19:25Jocko Willink?

  And for me, the, the, of the list of things that are important is this list that has like four things on it. It's like, is your fam, is my family healthy?

• 2:19:34Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:19:34Jocko Willink?

  Right? Like, okay. Like that's something I, but hey, they're healthy. So I'm not stressed about that. I can't, like, there's nothing else in the stress box that I'm really like, cause if, you know, what's going on? Oh, I, this product's coming out. Okay. Well, what if the product fails? Okay. Then we'll do something else. Yeah. Like I, so I think I'm pretty good with the, keeping myself out of the stress zone. Eating good. Um, when I eat like crap, I feel like crap. Uh, look, and pizzas are, you know, you gotta look at some pizza, whoever invented that, like what an evil bastard. And chocolate chip cookies on the yard. So like you get that, but, um.

• 2:20:12Speaker 01

  I'm lucky. I don't, I don't like pizzas.

• 2:20:15Jocko Willink?

  I didn't like it until I was like 10, but like my wife, man, she made this, she, my wife is the best prime rib, prime rib in the world. Like it's, it's the world-class prime rib. And somehow she tripled ordered or something over Thanksgiving because we, we eat prime rib for Thanksgiving, but she, we thought we were having people, people didn't show up, blah, blah, blah. So we had just massive hunks of prime rib.

• 2:20:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:20:37Jocko Willink?

  And probably I did like almost a carnivore thing for like four or five days. And then, and then she cooked another one. And man, I felt so good, bro. Just eating like one big slab of prime rib a day.

• 2:20:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:20:50Jocko Willink?

  And I just was like, hmm. So good diet. And then the sleep works out and the, and.

• 2:20:58Speaker 01

  So, so everything matters, right?

• 2:21:01Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:01Speaker 01

  Everything matters. You, you and I are very similar in that I don't stress or anything either. And by and large, I think it's because I don't really remember.

• 2:21:10Speaker 01

  I don't remember all the stuff I have to do. If I, if I could remember all of it, I'd be, I might be stressed. But you know, stress hormones get a bad rap because everything's that is negative. It's not negative, right? With no stress hormones, you die, right? Like stress hormones keep you alert in proportion to your environment. So if you're doing something that's really intense, you want to be able to stress, right? You want stress hormones because that's kind of adrenaline, noradrenaline in it, right? Yeah, that's amping you up, making you feel good. That cortisol is helping us releasing blood glucose and stuff like it, they're stored glycogen into, into blood glucose. So it's making you feel better. It's making you sharper, right? Like there's some things that's making you sharper. Now it does impair the prefrontal cortex a bit, which is like your executive functioning, your, um. So you don't want them to be too high because like you think about, you know, if you're in a fistfight, can you remember your phone number?

• 2:21:55Speaker 01

  Like probably not, right? Cause like your prefrontal cortex setting working, like you're not going to be planning your next trip or something while you're, while you're in something stressful. So, uh, that, you know, that's one factor. Now another factor is if you sleep really well, and if you don't stress a lot during the day, even if you short sleep, it's, it's not as big of a deal, right? Because the quality of sleep is keeping your stress hormones lower. Like the lowest your stress hormones ever are is when you're in deep sleep. And of course, they peak somewhere in the afternoon. Like, I've heard 11 to 1, 1 to 3. Like, it seems to be somewhere around noon to 1 in most of the people I test.

• 2:22:38Speaker 01

  You know, that, as, you know, as that peak goes up, people are feeling more and more alert. Their body temperature is going up. There's all sorts of like, good physiological things going on. But people feel better under more stress hormones. Now, you can go excessive and it becomes, it becomes negative. But just the fact that you're not somebody who stresses a lot, like, one of the, one of the biggest things I do, and, and I can, I can put out a link for your, if anyone in your audience wants to check this out. It's like, it's a PDF on my website, but I can like, do a lander for, we'll do docparsley.com. Yeah. Jaco, yeah, forward slash Jaco or something like, but people can download this.

• 2:23:23Speaker 01

  The most, the most powerful thing I do is, seems ridiculous, have people take a piece of notebook paper and like, draw a line straight down the middle. And it's like, on the left side, you're right, to do. On the right side, it's to worry. So, to do list is as far out as you're likely to worry about, right? Like, me, I, I'm kind of, I never really got out of butts. I'm kind of like, one evolution at a time. Like, maybe I'll plan two or three days ahead. Like, I don't, I'm not, I'm not somebody who's gonna be worried about something in months down the road. But some people are. So, as far out as your to do. To worry is shit you don't have any control over, but you know you're gonna worry about it. And you don't want to forget to have the opportunity to worry about it. So, you put that on the list. And then, you know, there's some other stuff about setting alarms and getting ready and all this stuff.

• 2:24:04Speaker 01

  But the big thing is when, when you go to sleep, you realize, like, first, I have to convince you of this. You have to convince yourself of this, that the best you're ever going to be at handling that list is after you've slept well, right? Your exercise is good, your nutrition's good, controlling your daily stress. The best you're ever going to be is after you fully wake up, right? Maybe an hour after you wake up. After a good night's sleep. So there's no sense in thinking about anything on that list while you're asleep, right? Cause you're interfering with your goal of being the best you tomorrow. So now from the time you go to bed till the time that alarm clock goes off in the morning, you don't ever know what time it is. Cause it doesn't matter. And you're going to lay in bed and you're going to like meditate and breathe and relax if

• 2:24:49Speaker 01

  you're not asleep. And then you're going to sleep when you sleep. And if you wake up, you just lay there and meditate, breathe and relax or like whatever. If your alarm's not going to go off for four hours, you'll fall back asleep. If your alarm goes off 30 minutes later. All right. You got seven and a half hours of sleep and 30 minutes of meditation. Get after it. Go. Right? So you, you kind of have that built in naturally. And, and I think a lot of team guys do because you, you go through some really stressful shit. Relative to like you get out in the entrepreneur world. It's like, it's kind of stressful, but like, if I fail, I can just start something else. Like something collapses. Like it's not really that. And I mean, I'm not getting shot at. I'm not cold. I'm not wet. You know,

• 2:25:30Speaker 01

  it's, it's just a different scene. So I think that's, that's why you're experiencing what you're experiencing. Now, the other thing too, to remember those like, if somebody goes out for a drink, right? They meet their buddies at a bar, like, you know, I'm going to stop by chat for a little bit and take off. So I'm just going to have one drink. Cause I don't want to drive drunk, right? I don't want to be impaired. And then somehow they end up having two. Well, maybe I'll have another. And then by like the fourth drink, they're like, I'm fine. I can, I can drive home. Like where did that decision-making shift? At some point, you lost awareness of your impairment. You became more impaired and you lost your ability to recognize that you're impaired. Sleep deprivation is the

• 2:26:12Speaker 01

  same way. So you wake up and you're just like, I feel good. Cause the stress hormones are making you feel good. Right? You're impaired though. Like we just know, like it's unavoidable. It's just like putting alcohol in your blood, putting, you know, putting stress hormones in your brain. Make your prefrontal cortex not as active. Now, there's a, there's a, there's a little bump where it's actually better, right? Because you're adrenalized. You can't do everything better, but there's some advantages to certain, to certain behaviors. But then it goes too high and it's like, it's really impaired, right? Like you think about somebody who's super anxious. Are they good at anything?

• 2:26:48Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's a bummer.

• 2:26:49Speaker 01

  No, they, they can't be good at anything because their prefrontal cortex is impaired. That's what, that's what anxiety really is. You don't trust yourself. You don't trust yourself to make a decision because,

• 2:27:01Speaker 01

  you know, you have a bad track record of making good decisions or something. And so you don't trust your ability to do it. And now that stresses you out even more. And so it can be a really a death spiral for a lot of people because,

• 2:27:14Speaker 01

  like I said, if you don't get enough sleep, then you wake up the next day with more stress hormones. Well, the absence of stress hormones is what allows you to fall asleep. So if you're running around with 20% more stress hormones than you need, now when you try to go to sleep, you're 20% higher than you should be. And it might not be low enough to fall asleep. And the other thing is your stress hormones are what's waking you up in the morning. Cortisol's waking you up. So if you're running 20% higher than you should be running, then you're sort of, your genetic background would have you running at, well, now you're going to wake up when you hit that same level that you maybe would have hit an hour later, if you didn't have these excess stress hormones.

• 2:27:57Jocko Willink?

  Let's talk sleep protocol for optimal sleep protocol.

• 2:28:02Speaker 01

  So,

• 2:28:05Speaker 01

  like I was, I was talking about earlier, you just think about,

• 2:28:10Speaker 01

  think about humans 200 years ago, right? Or maybe go back, say a thousand years. Hunter gatherers, right?

• 2:28:21Speaker 01

  We aren't, we don't see well at night. We're crappy predators anyways, right? Without weapons, we're useless, right? We couldn't fight a raccoon, right? We're, so we don't see well at night. The sun goes down, the blue light,

• 2:28:36Speaker 01

  leaves our eyes. We have nerves in our eyes that sense blue light. They have nothing to do with vision. And then that triggers the changes in our brain, which leads to the melatonin being secreted and the melatonin then.

• 2:28:49Speaker 01

  Changes a lot of things, but one of the big things happens increases this neuropeptide GABA, which slows down our brain. We quit interacting with the world as much and our body temperature goes down because the sun went down, right? So it's dark, we can't see, we back up into a corner to be safe because we're prey a thousand years ago. Like maybe we get in a cave, whatever, we make a fire and now you really can't see, right? Can't see past the fire. So your world gets secluded, you're not interacting, you're not jumping around, you're not climbing, you're not lifting, you're not, right? Maybe telling some stories, whatever. And then about three hours after the sun goes down, you feel like sleeping and you lay down and you sleep and your body temperature keeps going down, your stress hormones keep going down. At some point, all that, you know, starts coming back up,

• 2:29:34Speaker 01

  your body temperature kind of hits a maximum low and then it starts, it kind of fires, survival response and you start building things back up and your cortisol comes back up and you wake up right around the time the sun's coming up. You don't wake up because of the sun, you're just coincidental, right? Like, uh, cause that's how you're wired. Like every animal, every mammal on this planet uses the sun as its cue, when to be awake and when to be asleep. So that's how our ancestors did it. Closest you can get to that, right? That's what sleep hygiene is, right? Everything you read about sleep hygiene is that, right? So blacking out your windows. Yeah. Cause you don't, one, you don't want the light. Two, you don't want to know what time it is when you wake up, right?

• 2:30:17Speaker 01

  Turning down the temperature of your house, taking a shower, taking a cold shower, like, you know, when, so you think about what do you do as a little kid, right? You have a three, four-year-old kid bashing trucks together, banging drums, whatever. You don't just throw that kid in a bed and turn the light off and walk out. They need a ritual. They need time to get ready to go to sleep. We study hunter-gatherers today. Like there's still like, I don't know, 30,000 people who've never experienced electro, never experienced electricity. They still live like our ancestors lived. They go out, they hunt food, hunt and gather food for two hours a day. The rest of the day they're fucking off, having sex, playing around, whatever. Like they're the original aristocrats, right? Like that's where we would be if we stayed in that lifestyle. Um, so like you, you take your kid and what

• 2:31:01Speaker 01

  do you do? It's like, it's time for quiet play, right? Like put that stuff away. We're gonna do puzzles or, you know, whatever. We're gonna do something more sedate. We're gonna kind of dim lights and that stuff, right? And then we give them a bath. Why? Can lower their body temperature, right? Because you're not going to give them a 98 degree bath, give them like an 80 degree bath, 85 degree bath. Then they get out and you powder them up and you put them in really soft clothing. Right? Okay, so you're not stimulating their skin. And then you put them in bed, you know, make everything soft and comfortable and warm and cozy. And then you read them a book that they already know, right? They can think about something like Dr.

• 2:31:38Speaker 01

  Seuss, like trance inducing, rhythmic rhyming like this. Yeah, I do not like, right? And so the, the kids already know what the story, and that's why they want to read that book. It's like they want to be settled down and you want to distract yourself. So you can overcome any of that, right? You can overcome any of those systems. Um, now you're still, you're still going to secrete melatonin, but you can, you can get past the GABA, the GABA urgent slowdown of the brain, right? So if you've ever had an experience where you're like, you wake up and you're super tired, you didn't get enough sleep, you were, you're regretting whatever you did last night because

• 2:32:21Speaker 01

  you didn't get enough sleep. And so now you're like, well, man, I'm just going to go to work today. Like I'm going to do what I have to do today. And then I'm going to come home and go to bed like six o'clock and I'm going to sleep for like 10 hours and feel great tomorrow. And then one of your friends talk to you and they're like, go and have a beer. And then that's a CNS depression. It should make you more tired, right? And you start drinking beer and like, there's attractive women around, there's music going, there's lights, so there's whatever. And like, you all of a sudden feel really good. You don't, you don't need to go to sleep anymore. And like, and then you stay up till midnight that night. Now you're, you're sucking again the next day. So, um, so you can, you can work yourself past it. So just blocking the light, say like, whatever, you wear blue

• 2:33:04Speaker 01

  blocking glasses, dim your lights, you have light bulbs in your house that don't have any blue lights on, like all that's available. You're blacking everything out. Maybe you're living by candlelight after, you know, whatever, and you're getting, spending three hours getting ready for bed, but you're at your computer, working on some tight deadline for something for work that's stressful. And you're going to work till nine 59 and go get in bed at 10? No, that's not going to work. So you got to, you got to, you, you have to do something to approximate the loss of light in your eyes. You have to do something to slow your brain down to where you're not paying as much, as much attention to your environment. And you have to drop your body temperature. That, and that's what it is. So that, that PDF I was telling you about, that's really for people

• 2:33:48Speaker 01

  who have problems falling asleep, problems going back to sleep when they wake up.

• 2:33:55Speaker 01

  And so I have those people set an alarm clock like an hour before bed. And this is a generally a good idea. But like anything else, if you have problems, be super, like be fastidious and with this and like be exact and be, you know, very regimented. And then once you get healthy sleep back, just like, once you get fit, you don't have to do everything that you had to do to get in good shape. Like you just generally adhere to those principles. So like, but when you're having problems, like setting an alarm clock an hour before it's time to go to bed. And then you spend at least that hour getting ready for bed, right? Even if ideally, you'd be dimming

• 2:34:36Speaker 01

  the lights in your eyes three hours before bed, but there's ideal and there's reality.

• 2:34:41Jocko Willink?

  We'll take an hour.

• 2:34:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so, okay, so do that. Once you get in bed, you have your list, right? You've convinced yourself that the best time to handle that list is after you get a good night's sleep. You get in bed, you have no awareness of the time until that morning alarm clock goes off, whether you need an alarm clock or not, right? Because if you don't have the alarm clock, that's something to worry about.

• 2:35:06Jocko Willink?

  Oh, here's a Jaco admission. If I don't have an alarm clock, and there's any, like if I have to be at work or I have to do something, and I don't have an alarm clock, I literally will not sleep. I will just sit there and like, you know.

• 2:35:20Speaker 01

  Hey, when I first started traveling and lecturing a lot, I was petrified. I was gonna oversleep and like not make it to some lecture. So even with a couple of alarms set on my phone, I kept like, like every, every, I'm like waking up, did my alarm go off? Okay, so, right? And like, that's the thing. So I say, hey, you have a morning alarm clock, even if you think you don't need it, because that's one thing you're not going to worry about. So you're gonna, the last time you're gonna see your clock is when you get in bed. And until that alarm clock goes off, it doesn't matter, because you've already made yourself the agreement that I'm gonna be resting, relaxing, meditating, doing breath work, whatever, or I'm gonna be sleeping for the next eight hours. That's it. I'm not doing anything else. And if some, and something

• 2:36:05Speaker 01

  on, something pops in my mind, I go, that's on the list. I'm gonna handle that list in the morning when I'm feeling good, right? When I'm prepared, now if there's something that's not on the list, give my permission to turn the light on and write it down. Now it's on the list, right? And then you just lay in bed. When you wake up, you don't know what time it is. If you go to the bathroom, go to the bathroom, get back in bed, you don't know what time it is.

• 2:36:27Jocko Willink?

  So I have like a little LED red like clock by my bed. That's, that's not needed.

• 2:36:35Speaker 01

  It's not needed. In fact, it's, it's counterproductive.

• 2:36:37Jocko Willink?

  Counterproductive because then I'm thinking about what time it is.

• 2:36:39Speaker 01

  As soon as you, as soon, as soon as you know what time it is, you're, you have some decisions to make now, right? Cause it's like, well, I start doing some mental math, right? I'm like, well, I'm not feeling sleepy. It's only 1:30 at night. So if I fall, if I can fall asleep in the next 30 minutes, right? And you start thinking about stuff like that. Or my alarm's going to go off in 45 minutes anyways. I'm feeling kind of awake and like, I got this stuff to do and I got that stuff. I might as well just, right? And so it's better to just not know and go, hey, no, I'm going to be, I want to be at my best tomorrow. My best is when that alarm clock goes off. And like I said, I don't care how much meditation and breath work and relaxation you get relative to sleep.

• 2:37:23Speaker 01

  Do your, do your best to get all of that asleep. But if, you know, an hour of that meditation and breath work and relaxation, progressive muscle relaxation, whatever you want to do, whatever kind of cools you out, whatever lowers your stress hormones, like, I don't, I don't care. It's like, that's restorative, like that's, um, non-sleeping rest has its benefits as well. And it's helping with all of that stuff. And, and as I'm sure you've heard at this point, um, you know, sleep regulates your appetite. Right? So how hungry I am tomorrow is going to be determined by how well I sleep today. Also what I crave, the only animal on this planet that sleep deprives itself is us.

• 2:38:06Speaker 01

  Other animals only do it if they're starving or they're being preyed upon. So if they're being stalked, they're only going to sleep the bare minimum. If they're starving, they're going to wake up earlier, go to sleep later. So they can travel further and find some food. So evolutionarily, it makes sense that we're wired the same way. So if we're not sleeping, our brain's like, oh. Are we being stalked or are we starving? Which is it, right? And so I want to eat novel foods when I'm starving. So I'll eat anything, right? Like a green and brown, green and orange donut. Yeah, let's eat that, right?

• 2:38:40Speaker 01

  Also, if I'm starving, what I want, I want sugar for my brain, like right now, as much glucose as my brain can get. This is my brain is working off of glucose. I don't have an option there. Ketones can do some of it if you're really ketogenic, but it's not, it's still majority glucose. And then if I'm starving, what do I, I want to store some fat. So I better eat some fat too, right? So what, so what's a donut? It's fried sugar bread, right? And so like I get all the, I get the fat and I get all of the, you know, and I get all of the glucose in me. So not only is it regulating how hungry I'm going to be, but what am I going to crave? And then the worst part is that it determines what my body does with what I eat. Right? So I eat proteins, carbohydrates and fats.

• 2:39:26Speaker 01

  Some of that's going to be stored as fat. Some of that's not going to be absorbed at all and it's going to go out of waste. And some of that's going to be used as energy. Depends on how well I've slept and how my hormones are balanced. And so, you know, one, one of the big jokes, especially on men is that, you know, our, our, the fat that we think of as being fat, right? Not the, not the fat around our organs and stuff, but like our subcutaneous fat, that has a lot of aromatase in it, the enzyme that converts testosterone from estrogen. And your brain uses estrogen as the measurement of how much testosterone you have. So if your estrogen is really high, your brain's like, oh, that's coming from testosterone. So our testosterone must be really high too. So we don't need to make as much testosterone now.

• 2:40:09Speaker 01

  And now you get more fat and more of your testosterone becomes estrogen. And like, it's this self-defeating spiral. It just keeps getting worse. Like now you're getting fatter because your hormones are low. But you're converting, like you have higher estrogen levels because more fat means more. Downward spiral. Yeah. And so now you're, uh, and you know, it's like, it's the same thing of having high stress hormones because you're not sleeping. Well, now you can't sleep because you have high stress hormones and now you, now you're not going to get to sleep. So tomorrow you're going to have even more stress. And so you can't sleep because you have. Too much stress hormones and you have too much stress hormones because you can't sleep. Same thing with estrogen and testosterone gets converted. It's like you're not making as much testosterone

• 2:40:51Speaker 01

  because your estrogen levels are high, which leads to higher estrogen levels, which means lower testosterone level. And that's a self-defeating, self-propagating downward spiral. And so, like, all of that stuff's

• 2:41:10Speaker 01

  non-negotiable, right? That's gonna happen no matter how well you eat, no matter how well you control your stress and all that other stuff. And how much you exercise. And the other thing I tell people all the time, which is not popular at all, is that if you're sleep deprived, you shouldn't work out, right? Shouldn't exercise. I mean, you should move, you should do activity because there's benefit to that, but you shouldn't exercise with the intent of getting better or something, right? To get stronger or faster, more coordinated. Because like I said, like, all that's happening when you're asleep. All of that repair and actually getting better at anything is happening while you're asleep.

• 2:41:50Jocko Willink?

  I'm just gonna plead the fifth over here.

• 2:41:54Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. I was gonna ask you that and I was like, I pretty much know what your answer's gonna be because there's people that have to make that decision. Like, am I better off tomorrow? Okay, I know I gotta be at work by eight. I know it's a late night. It's one o'clock in the morning. My kid was awake or whatever. It's midnight. My kid was awake. Do I get up and do the workout? Or do I get an extra hour of sleep? Which is better? And yours is like, sleep all day. Sleep is the answer.

• 2:42:22Speaker 01

  To an extent. Like, if sleep is gonna prevent you from doing anything, any type of activity, then I'd find a happy medium on that. Like, go every other day or split it in half or something like that. Because you need the activity. There's a lot of benefits. And by activity, I mean...

• 2:42:39Speaker 01

  You know, whatever, going on a walk, doing like some zone two type of cardio, doing some movement like you could do, like whatever you could do, like movement drills or something like that, but like I wouldn't recommend rolling with somebody intensely and you know, and not doing schoolwork, like actually fighting, like I wouldn't do that if I'm sleep deprived. One, you're way more likely to get injured as well. Like there's a, there's a very, very clear correlation between how many hours you sleep and your risk of injury. And it's, and it's, it's huge. It's substantial. It's the, the, um, the difference, they was studied on high school students. The difference between five hours, you know, six hours of sleep and nine hours of sleep was like a 300% difference.

• 2:43:25Speaker 01

  Alright, so you're.

• 2:43:26Jocko Willink?

  Of getting injured.

• 2:43:27Speaker 01

  Getting injured.

• 2:43:27Jocko Willink?

  Well, the dudes are spending three more hours in bed every day. Of course they ain't.

• 2:43:32Speaker 01

  Well, he's getting injured in their sport. So like while they're, while they're doing this work.

• 2:43:36Jocko Willink?

  So we need to get our sleep. That's the, uh.

• 2:43:39Speaker 01

  So here, here's something that's really interesting for your guys, for your, um, when you're working with fighters, right? So, you know, let's say I'm a great grappler and I'm going against a striker and I want to, and like I have a camp and I'm like, whatever, eight weeks to get, improve my boxing or whatever my striking is. And so,

• 2:43:59Speaker 01

  it, it, so if, if, if I wanted to teach you something and I said, that's something you're gonna do, right? So I'm gonna teach you how to tap, type with your left hand or something, or play an instrument or something like that. And I say, hey, come in for an hour of training in the morning. Okay. And at the end of that hour, we see where you're at. We see what your skill level is. And then once you come back at seven o'clock tonight, I'm gonna retest you. When you come back at seven, you're gonna be worse than your left training. If you go home and you go to sleep and you come back and test, you're gonna be better than your left training. Cause you're actually learning when you sleep. Interestingly, if I say, I'm gonna teach you something this morning. I want you to take a nap today and then come back and test at seven, you'll come back and test better than you left your training.

• 2:44:41Speaker 01

  And then when you go home and go to sleep, you're gonna get better again. So if somebody could break their day. And like have a midday nap, they could essentially get two days worth of training in a day.

• 2:44:51Jocko Willink?

  All fighters are doing that all the time. Yeah. Like that's what fighters do. Yeah. Like come train, go home, sleep, come train, go home, sleep. Right. Train, go home and sleep for the night. Yeah. That's like.

• 2:45:02Speaker 01

  And that's, and that's like, uh, two days in football too, right? Like a huge, huge skill bump during those two weeks because. All you're doing is sleeping and practicing. Like that's it. It's like, it just seems like one long day. It's just like, I don't know. Slept, woke up and went, went to practice and slept and woke up and went to practice. Cause we would like, you know, cause so damn hot where we were like, you know, a hundred and fifteen degrees in the summer. So like midday, they, you know, sent us home. Go eat, you fall asleep for two hours or whatever, and then you go back to practice and, but like, they weren't doing it for that reason, but.

• 2:45:41Speaker 01

  You know, a lot of things that, once, you know, once you start learning the physiology of things, a lot of things become obvious, you know, it's like. Uh, the sleep deprivation in boot camp, the sleep deprivation, like hell weakened buds. That's a strategy. Like we're, one, we're seeing how well you deal with it because that matters. But two, we're also looking for psychiatric disease, right? Cause sleep deprivation.

• 2:46:07Speaker 01

  You know, can.

• 2:46:09Jocko Willink?

  Things come to the surface.

• 2:46:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, can reveal that. And we're in that age group where young men tend to have their psychotic break if they're gonna be schizophrenic or. They're bipolar or like, that's gonna be revealed like in their teen to mid twenties kind of thing. So let's just make it happen.

• 2:46:27Jocko Willink?

  It's also a brainwashing thing. Like when they brainwash, anyone that gets brainwashed is sleep deprivation.

• 2:46:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're way more suggestible. Yeah. Cause again, your prefrontal cortex hasn't working and you're like, you can't, and you don't have enough energy to like defend your thoughts.

• 2:46:47Jocko Willink?

  China is great. America sucks. Yes.

• 2:46:52Jocko Willink?

  Oh man. Awesome. Um, what else, man? Do we, does that get us caught up to the current day?

• 2:46:58Jocko Willink?

  Other than where to, where do people find you?

• 2:47:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, uh, docparsley.com.

• 2:47:02Jocko Willink?

  You got docparsley.com. You're on Instagram.

• 2:47:06Speaker 01

  Kirk Parsley. I'm on Instagram.

• 2:47:07Jocko Willink?

  At Kirk Parsley.

• 2:47:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, at Kirk Parsley.

• 2:47:09Jocko Willink?

  And you say you're back on Twitter. I think we were talking about.

• 2:47:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:47:12Jocko Willink?

  You're back on Twitter.

• 2:47:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, I got reinstated. Yeah, I got reinstated.

• 2:47:16Jocko Willink?

  Cause you got shut down. You got, you got, um.

• 2:47:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was, I was like, I was like publishing or, or I was like sharing, you know, published research about.

• 2:47:27Jocko Willink?

  About what? Covid?

• 2:47:28Speaker 01

  Covid.

• 2:47:29Jocko Willink?

  And you got shut down.

• 2:47:29Speaker 01

  Mask, you know, social distancing, like whatever. When my Instagram account, I started really with doing a bunch of videos on code because it was such, such bullshit at the beginning. I was just like, oh, like, everybody knows this too. It's none, I'm not brilliant. It's like everybody with any kind of basic biology understands that natural immunity is a thing, right? And it's better than a vaccine. Everybody knows that always. That's always been true. We acted like it didn't even exist. Like I'm pointing that out, you know, CNN has their death tracker rolling at the bottom of the screen every day. I'm like, if you did that with car wrecks, no one would drive cars either, right? Because it's like, and they never give the denominator, like this many people died today.

• 2:48:14Speaker 01

  How many people usually die? Right? Oh, so it's only 20 more, right? All right, right? So you, um, so I like, I spoke out a bunch against it. Surprisingly, I didn't get banned by Instagram. Uh, but Twitter, I was just sharing some, I'd like share research and be like, you know, this suggests that that doesn't work or this suggests that we're missing that, right? Um, and, uh, just one day, nobody said anything. Never got an email. This is one day. I just wasn't there. And then I was like, huh, couldn't get on. So as you, you know, you've been banned or blocked, whatever the phrasing was.

• 2:48:53Speaker 01

  And then, and I had about 10,000 followers or something. And then all of a sudden they're gone, like zero, zero, zero. But all my posts were still there and I couldn't access many of my posts. I couldn't do anything with them.

• 2:49:06Speaker 01

  And then, uh, it was after the announcement that, that Elon was going to buy Twitter, but it was before he actually bought it. And I just.

• 2:49:17Jocko Willink?

  Reappeared?

• 2:49:17Speaker 01

  All of a sudden, just reappeared.

• 2:49:22Jocko Willink?

  I got it. I got an email that time. It's like, you've been reinstated and I'm like, oh, okay.

• 2:49:28Speaker 01

  So.

• 2:49:29Jocko Willink?

  That's where they can find it. And you can get your, uh, seat formula at docparsley.com if people want to order that.

• 2:49:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're gonna do docparsley.com choco though.

• 2:49:38Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 2:49:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:49:39Jocko Willink?

  Cool.

• 2:49:39Speaker 01

  For your audiences, uh, and, and we'll, and I'll put that worksheet on there too. So.

• 2:49:45Jocko Willink?

  Right on.

• 2:49:46Speaker 01

  Anybody who digs that stuff.

• 2:49:48Jocko Willink?

  Um, what else? Echo, you got any questions?

• 2:49:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, a couple. So the.

• 2:49:51Jocko Willink?

  By the way, Echo is in full support of everything you say, like to the end through this guy. Rest is at the top of his list for life.

• 2:49:58Speaker 02

  I'm telling you, right? You can't just.

• 2:50:00Speaker 01

  He's so, he's Hawaiian though, right?

• 2:50:02Speaker 02

  Yeah. And why? There's a, there's a very good.

• 2:50:04Speaker 01

  It's the culture, man.

• 2:50:05Speaker 02

  Robust rest culture.

• 2:50:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:50:07Speaker 02

  Very robust. So, um, okay. So the down regulating of receptors, is that kind of the, the whole explanation for tolerance of any drug? Like, you know?

• 2:50:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. Um, so the technical phrase for that is, is tachyphylaxis. Yeah. And that's, that's really what that means essentially. There, there's, there's some nuance to that, but that's an easy way to think about it. It's just, um, it doesn't matter, you know, it doesn't matter what's in your blood if it doesn't have a receptor, right? So you have, you have to have a place to catch it. Both of those things are equal. So think of it like a lock and a key, right? So like the, the keys, maybe what's floating around in your bloodstream, but then the lock is locked, it fits that key is the receptor. And so if you don't have the receptors, it doesn't matter how many keys are floating around.

• 2:50:52Speaker 02

  Yeah. And then different receptors can bind to like different stuff, right? Like, you know, Holly, you said, and you mentioned, I forget all the, all the names, but you know, a receptor made for a very specific thing can, a drug can be developed to be like, hey, it can bind to that receptor.

• 2:51:06Speaker 01

  And that, that's how most pharmacology is. So most pharmacology.

• 2:51:12Speaker 01

  Well, you know, most, most medicine, most biology is just, it's really just descriptive, right? And like, we figure out a way to look to see something or to measure something. And then we go, oh, this happens. And then that happens. And then we memorize the steps as though we now know something. Like, all you did is like, put names to shit that was happening and memorize it. Like, you're not, but then they'll fit, well, okay, so this molecule, we know when this molecule binds that, it does this. So we can like, cut that out if that's a problem, or we can add some, like, we can have something bind that receptor that will do nothing. Or we can have something bind that receptor that does better than whatever is going to bind it, right? And so that's, that's really what pharmacology

• 2:51:54Speaker 01

  is mainly about, other than antibiotics, which is a different category. But most, most drugs that have some effect on your physiology, that's how they're doing it.

• 2:52:01Speaker 02

  And then is catching up on sleep a thing?

• 2:52:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. So there's

• 2:52:09Jocko Willink?

  You got some sleep, you gotta catch up on that?

• 2:52:10Speaker 02

  Sometimes, yeah. Well, no, but well, it actually, at first, I was like, I heard that it is, and I heard that it isn't. And then, but then you guys said, we're talking about like, hey, don't work out when you're sleep deprived. Like, bro, I'll work out, sleep deprived, sometimes have a great workout.

• 2:52:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:52:24Speaker 02

  You ask me to do that the next day, bro, I'm dead. So I'll never do it. So like, I feel like I use, I went into the bank a little bit, used some stress hormones, banged out a solid workout.

• 2:52:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:52:34Speaker 02

  You know, caught up on some sleep, did my full recovery, and I'm staying, I'm good to go.

• 2:52:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. No, what was your original question?

• 2:52:42Speaker 02

  Is like catching up on that, is that a thing? Or am I kind of at a bigger loss?

• 2:52:46Speaker 01

  Yeah. So what, so what I, what I say about it is, um, like, like, the reason, the reason that it takes eight hours to recover from being awake for 16 hours is because you're essentially, you're essentially stripping yourself of resources and you're building up waste products, right? So every cell in your body is like a miniature version of you. What do you, like, you're awake a certain portion of the day, you're asleep a certain portion of the day, you take in nutrients, you do work with that nutrients, and you create waste products, right? And your cell has to do all of that, right? And so your cells are producing waste products. A lot of that stuff isn't cleared out while you're awake. It has to be cleared out while you're asleep, especially in the brain.

• 2:53:31Speaker 01

  So if you don't do that, and let's say it's mildly toxic, so it's causing some inflammation. And then you don't get enough sleep, and especially like you stay up all night, well, you know, you have, you know, you're going through tomorrow and you're just building up more waste products. And so that's sort of damaging you. Not hugely, it's not like, it's not gonna, you know, cause some sort of noticeable brain damage, but just a slight impairment, right? Maybe a little inflammation, it's maybe strips some cells, some nutrients, something. So I say it's like if you break your leg and you just walk around on your broken leg until it heals, it's still gonna heal some, to some degree, at some point, and you're just

• 2:54:14Speaker 01

  gonna become the functional new you. Now, how badly it's broken and how well it repairs will determine how, how good the new you is. But if you break your leg and you go see a doctor and you line everything back up and you make sure that everything's right there and you put a cast on it and you take the weight off of it, and like now when that repairs, that bone's actually stronger, but there's still like a scar tissue in there. I can still go do an X-ray and say, oh, that was broken there. May, that bone might actually be better than, than it was, but there's some noticeable changes, there's a noticeable difference in there. Whereas you didn't, you didn't repair it as quickly as you could and maybe there's a lot of deformity and a lot of problems. It's a, it's a weak metaphor,

• 2:54:56Speaker 01

  but it's the best thing I have. So paying back your sleep debt does rebalance your hormones, rebalance your inflammatory cascades, your, a lot of your signaling molecules that tell your other cells what to do and tell, well, tell cells what to do, tell cells how to communicate. All of that stuff can be mended, but if there's some damage down in there to where like you start, you have some inflammation, you wall off some of the waste products with the, with like a protein that kind of like encapsulates it, then like that's all damage. And so you don't necessarily recover a hundred percent, but you can recover your function back. But that doesn't mean that you didn't do maybe a little bit of damage here and there, you know?

• 2:55:38Speaker 02

  Huh. Interesting. See how complex this is, bro. Bro, it goes deep, right? You better get your rest, Hoey.

• 2:55:44Speaker 01

  Doc, any closing thoughts, man? Oh, man, just happy to be here, proud to serve.

• 2:55:55Speaker 01

  I don't know. There's so, there's so much to talk about, but uh, uh, you know, for people in there not, not, not sleeping well, I'd say that's, that's the, that's the foundation. I think you get, get that, get that in place. Um, and then that should repair hormones, but if it doesn't like work on hormones and then like you and I were talking about outside of it, I think, uh, any, anybody who has some lingering issues after that, it's a, you know, go find yourself a doctor that does good peptides that, that helps regenerate, helps changes the self signaling, changes what the cells do, a lot like hormones do. There's a lot of promising stuff

• 2:56:37Speaker 01

  in there. You can, we can probably start fixing some, well, we can definitely fix some injuries without surgery now that used to be surgical, um, especially tendons and ligaments and stuff like that. So, um, unsolicited advice for your audience.

• 2:56:52Jocko Willink?

  No, it's awesome. I, I know I always, uh, I often get a bad rap for being anti-sleep and I'm certainly not. And, uh, you know, even in the book, Discipline Equals Freedom, Field Manual, I wrote like, hey, you need sleep. You need to get as much sleep as you need to be performing at your optimal levels. So yeah, I'm on board.

• 2:57:13Speaker 01

  So, so, you know, I, I say eight hours because the research bores out that it's somewhere around seven and a half hours plus or minus half an hour. So it could be closer to seven. The only way anybody really knows how much sleep they need is if they go to bed at the same time every day, wake up the same time every day without an alarm clock and they feel good and refreshed. And like, that's the only way to know. And again, that's ideal. What's reality? Like, I don't know. There's some, there's a bridge in between those two where we're going to, you know, use gadgets and tricks and supplements and things like that, like to help bring reality closer to ideal. But that's the only way you'd really know. And that's, and it's not the same every day. Like the, the thing is to remember this is biology. It's not a, it's not a car. It's not a, we're

• 2:57:56Speaker 01

  not tuning a carburetor. Like this is biology. It's messy. It's approximate. And you know, you don't need exactly the same amount of sleep tonight as you'll need the next night or the day before. It's like, if I go run an ultra marathon today, then I probably have like 26 hours in a row of sleep. If I do nothing but lay on my couch and watch television, I might get away with six and a half hours of sleep. Like it's, it's an approximation and the whole idea. You know, the Pareto distribution, like anything else, man, it's like 80% of the time you want to be doing the right thing and that makes you more resilient for the 20% of the time when you can't do the right thing, right? Or when you don't want to do the right thing and, you know, the trade off is worth it for you. So, you know, the most important

• 2:58:39Speaker 01

  part is not to be a zealot and the number one reason people don't sleep well is because they're worried about not sleeping well, right? Because they hear something like this, or like they'll hear me on a, on a law enforcement podcast or something and I tell them, shift workers die on average 12 to 14 years earlier than everybody else because the World Health Organization classifies shift work as a type 2A carcinogen, which is the same thing as cigarettes were, which means we're pretty damn sure this causes cancer, but it would be unethical to test that, like we can't do research and cause cancer in people. So, it's a type 2A carcinogen. And your risk of heart attack, stroke, like everything increases

• 2:59:19Speaker 01

  because you're sleeping against your circadian rhythm, right? And so, they hear something like that and now they're panicked because like, well, I work shift work. I don't want to die. I don't want to die 12 years earlier. So what do I do? And so the number one reason people don't sleep well is because they're worried about not sleeping well.

• 2:59:39Jocko Willink?

  Maybe that's one of the reasons I sleep well.

• 2:59:41Speaker 01

  Chill out, right? Like chill out, chill out, do what I said, like download that worksheet and, you know, do what I said, get, get in bed, like get in bed for eight hours a night, like figure out a way to do that. That's not impossible. I realize that it's not necessarily 100% possible for 100% of people, but do the best you can to do that. And let it be what it is. Like you'll help people say, oh, you can't get, you can't go to sleep, get up and get out of your bed. You don't want to associate your bed without, with not sleeping. And so then go sit in the living room and read a book or something and then come back. And when you feel tired, I don't agree. Like I have not seen that work well. And, and I, I mean, I've been doing this for 13, 12, 13 years now. I've been, I've been

• 3:00:26Speaker 01

  helping people on this and I, I don't, I don't see any way around the fact that.

• 3:00:34Speaker 01

  If I get up and read, I'm not doing myself any benefit, right? If I lay in bed and meditate, at least my stress hormones are lower. At least I'm getting some non-sleep rest now. So just lay in bed. And the only reason that you're going to associate with negative thoughts is if you're stressed out about not sleeping. So if you're not stressed out, you're just going, well, I'm just going to meditate. Like, well, then it's now it's just a place to meditate and sleep and have sex. Why not? Like, all those are great things, like just be in there as much as you can be. So.

• 3:01:01Jocko Willink?

  I think Echo's next tattoo is going to say, get in bed, stay in bed.

• 3:01:08Speaker 01

  Maybe. My, my son, he wrote like this commercial for me. I couldn't find anyone to work in it, to work, to have act in it. Everybody's like, oh, like all the team guys are like, oh, it's cheap. I like, I don't, because it says like, you know, I'm a badass or whatever. It's like badass is like me or something and whatever. And then like, I can't afford any SAG actor because they like, you gotta pay and have insurance and all this stuff. And so, uh, never ended up making it. But at the end of it, he's like, so what are you waiting for? Wake up, get some sleep.

• 3:01:40Speaker 01

  But that's like a tagline in the back. We have like T-shirts for that and stuff.

• 3:01:44Jocko Willink?

  Wake up, get some sleep.

• 3:01:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:01:45Jocko Willink?

  Awesome, man. Well, thanks for coming down. Also, anyone that's listening to this podcast right now at this time, or if you ever listened to this podcast before, you can thank Doc Parsley, because if it wasn't for Doc Parsley, this podcast wouldn't exist. Why is that? Because Doc Parsley introduced me to Peter Attia and said, Jaco should go on Tim Ferriss's podcast. So that, that is literally the one little pivot in my life where it was like, oh, you know, I meet Peter and Peter's like, yep. Tells Tim, you should have this guy on.

• 3:02:22Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 3:02:23Jocko Willink?

  And there it was. I went on Tim Ferriss's podcast and Tim Ferriss, uh, when we got done recording, he looked at me and said, you should have your own podcast. And I was like, hmm, that, that could be a thing and then. Joe Rogan heard that podcast and invited me in his podcast immediately. And then in the middle of that podcast, he said, you should have your own podcast. And so between those two guys, I started this podcast. So

• 3:02:43Speaker 01

  Well, when the kind of two top podcasters tell you that you should have a podcast. Yeah, it's, it's funny. The first podcast I ever did was Rob Wulff's and it was because he was at my house. I think we were doing one of the pre or post retreats. Maybe not, but we're definitely lecturing at the same event. And so he was staying at my house and he all of a sudden goes, oh shit, I'm supposed to be on a podcast. You want to do a podcast? I'm like, yeah, what's a podcast? And so I get, I, so we sit down with like a computer between us and, and he's, and it's like on the armrest in between the two of us. And we just talk in his computer and like, I don't even know what we're doing. Like I'm,

• 3:03:27Speaker 01

  I'm not the slightest bit nervous or concerned because I don't know what the hell we're doing. It's like, I'm just talking to Rob. And then he, he calls me and then maybe like two weeks later and he goes, he goes, dude, you got to do your own podcast. I'm like, why? And he's like, he's, I had Ferris on eight weeks ago and your podcast has more downloads than his, double the podcast downloads is his and it's only been up for two weeks. And I was like, what's a download? Anyway, so like he tried to talk me into doing my own podcast and I'm like, I don't know. Like, what am I going to do a podcast on sleep? Like that doesn't seem, doesn't seem sustainable. Like you can't do 400 episodes on sleep. Like

• 3:04:08Speaker 01

  maybe I guess maybe you can. And that's the only thing anybody knew me for back then. It's like, so, um, yeah, I, I think it would be cool because I'd like to, there's lots of people I'd like to talk to, but I don't have the work ethic and time to do it. Like I travel so much, like I don't, I'd be scattered, like trying to compress doing 10 in a day or something. Like, I don't know. Like

• 3:04:30Jocko Willink?

  It's more work than people think.

• 3:04:33Speaker 01

  It's a lot of, it's a lot of work. Yeah.

• 3:04:34Jocko Willink?

  I think people don't realize what goes into it. But, um, well, like I said, if it wasn't for you introducing me to Peter and then to Tim.

• 3:04:43Speaker 01

  Well, well, I think you got to, you got to give yourself plenty of credit. I mean, lots, lots of guys have been on this podcast and not done with you, not done with you done. Yeah. Like you.

• 3:04:54Speaker 01

  Well, but yeah, we we knew the we knew the Jocker legend would spread.

• 3:04:59Jocko Willink?

  Well, I appreciated it, man.

• 3:05:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:05:01Jocko Willink?

  And yeah, thanks for coming down.

• 3:05:04Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me on.

• 3:05:05Jocko Willink?

  Obviously, thanks for your service. Thanks for what you did in the teams, holding the line. And, you know, especially for when you got done with the teams, coming back and taking care of the teams and the team guys. And thanks for what you're doing today to continue to take care of them and take care of other people, man. Appreciate it.

• 3:05:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, definitely. It's definitely my honor. Like, it truly is my favorite thing to do. If I if I could just do, if I could just work with SF guys, like, I'd do that all day. Like, it's it's fun. Like, you know, the community is just like, it's cool. It's cool, guys, to to to treat. And they're not fucking entitled little bitches that are gonna call me every hour. So like, like, they apologize for calling me once every three months. Be like, hey, I'm really sorry, but I ran out of men like six weeks ago. Yeah. So it's a it's a great community. And like I said, it, you know, the team solely turned my life around. Like, there there's no way I would have achieved 10% of what I've achieved in my life

• 3:06:08Speaker 01

  if I hadn't gone there first. So like, I there there's no amount of payback for that. It's like, I'm indebted to that organization for the rest of my life. So.

• 3:06:18Jocko Willink?

  Yep. You and me both, man.

• 3:06:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:06:20Jocko Willink?

  Awesome. Thanks for coming up, bro.

• 3:06:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, thank you.

• 3:06:24Jocko Willink?

  With that, Kirk Parsley has left the building. Echo, probably your most beloved podcast you've heard.

• 3:06:34Speaker 02

  We'll say it's my cup of tea.

• 3:06:35Jocko Willink?

  It's your cup of tea, talking about the fact that rest is important, as you like to say.

• 3:06:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, but he was talking, when you guys were talking about the fast twitch, slow twitch, and you know, like, you're.

• 3:06:49Jocko Willink?

  Intermediate twitch.

• 3:06:49Speaker 02

  Bro, that was like. I never categorized, even though I understand, I understand. And so I was like, like him where sprinting, cool. Even if I get in good shape, I'll sprint all day as long as I get some rest between sets, you know, kind of a thing. But bro, put me on the bike or running or something, bro. I feel like I'm suffering the whole time. I still do it. And then even when I'm done, if, if I'm in normal shape or whatever, if, when I'm done, I don't feel super gassed. It's just that I'm suffering so much during the run.

• 3:07:20Jocko Willink?

  That's how I felt and I, I wish I should have looked it up. I don't know where to go to cover that subject, but. I remember reading an article and they had discovered this new like intermediate twitch muscle. And I was like, that's me. And I felt like, I felt like so good because it made sense. Okay. Cause like I said, I was never winning any sprints and I was never winning any 14 mile runs. But on a rucksack where it's just like, hey, you gotta put out for a long period of time and be a little bit strong. I was good at that. Grappling is the same. And by the way, my grappling, my, my physical genetics. They're good for a particular kind of grappling. And it's actually unfortunate for you. It's the kind of grappling that you and I do.

• 3:08:04Jocko Willink?

  Right? Like you have the genetics for a three minute round or two, three minute rounds or something like this. I have good genetics for 38 minutes.

• 3:08:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:08:12Jocko Willink?

  You know?

• 3:08:13Speaker 02

  Well, I, yeah. And I would put it this way, yours, you're good for 38 minutes going like. Putting on, yeah, putting on some heat.

• 3:08:21Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:08:22Speaker 02

  Look, you're not exploding through stuff, which actually in jujitsu, you should probably avoid exploding into and out of stuff.

• 3:08:28Jocko Willink?

  Unless it's a seven minute match, you know, unless it's seven minutes. If it's a seven minute match, I'm going to, you know, you're getting the takedown. Like if you and I went in a, if you and I did a tournament right now, a tournament match. 10 minutes would be problematic for you. So we couldn't even go black belt. We'd have to go like blue belt, like five minute or six minute match. You could win.

• 3:08:46Speaker 02

  With.

• 3:08:47Jocko Willink?

  You know, you could win.

• 3:08:48Speaker 02

  Even, I would say more like a three.

• 3:08:50Jocko Willink?

  Okay. Three minute match, you could win. Six minute match, probably going to be hurt.

• 3:08:54Speaker 02

  Yeah. After that four and a half, five. Yeah.

• 3:08:58Jocko Willink?

  Cause you could, you could get like. Some kind of a takedown maybe, even though the problem with you trying to get a takedown on me is you, you would be too threatened by the guillotine and you'd probably not go for it and you'd probably lose.

• 3:09:08Speaker 02

  That's true. See, and now you're talking and, and this is not.

• 3:09:11Jocko Willink?

  I'm getting strategic on you though.

• 3:09:12Speaker 02

  Yes, which I respect.

• 3:09:14Jocko Willink?

  Which is what I would be doing anyways, by the way.

• 3:09:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, so which is a good point actually. So look, we're talking about jujitsu here, right? Even though before we're talking about kind of like endurance and conditioning, whatever. So jujitsu, the mental part of jujitsu is way more important than the physical part of it. Where like getting excited and like all these things and what I'm gonna do, how much you know compared to how much I know? What you know about my, like all this stuff like is such a huge factor. So just keep that in mind. So we're just talking essentially like nuts to nuts. If me and my physical attributes and a given, or we'll say standard amount of jujitsu knowledge versus you and your physical attributes versus the same amount of like knowledge, just the physical attributes. It would be problematic for me anything after four and a half minutes, I would say.

• 3:09:59Jocko Willink?

  That's if we were even on everything else.

• 3:10:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:10:02Jocko Willink?

  Even on knowledge, basically.

• 3:10:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:10:03Jocko Willink?

  Cause we're both about, I mean, we're both like 225.

• 3:10:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:10:07Jocko Willink?

  And we're both the same height and so, so that's a pretty good even match.

• 3:10:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:10:12Jocko Willink?

  But I just know more than you do.

• 3:10:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:10:15Jocko Willink?

  But if we took that away and we were just you against me with the same brain, the same knowledge.

• 3:10:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:10:21Jocko Willink?

  You'd be good for a little bit of time.

• 3:10:23Speaker 02

  Actually, I might, I could probably turn up the heat for a good two, two and a half minutes and maybe get the better. But bro, that heaviness and that like after a while, I'm like, bro, just, just kill me.

• 3:10:35Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and I could survive two and a half minutes pretty much with anything.

• 3:10:38Speaker 02

  So that makes sense when you're talking about the rock where like someone like me would be like, rock is light. Do that for like 10, 20, 30 minutes, bro, no ways, bro, I don't wanna take that thing off. Like after a few minutes or whatever, but it'll feel light and it'll get heavy real quick. And then you, and then an endurance guy. Brother, that thing's gonna be heavy immediately.

• 3:11:00Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Like, it's kinda too, like, I can jog pretty easily, even with a ruck, even with a ruck that's like seventy-five pounds, I can jog, like jog.

• 3:11:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:11:12Jocko Willink?

  It's gonna put a hurtin' on some guys that are a little bit smaller, you know, or that have so much endurance muscle.

• 3:11:17Speaker 02

  Yeah. So it made sense, man, and thinking back to all my experiences where I'm suffering, you know? And again, it's not like I can't do it, but I feel like, bro, these guys running have to be suffering way less than me.

• 3:11:27Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, he, he trained for a couple of years and got worse at triathlon. That's crazy.

• 3:11:34Speaker 02

  That is crazy.

• 3:11:35Jocko Willink?

  All right, but I know you liked it because we talked about rest. I know you're a proponent.

• 3:11:39Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:11:40Jocko Willink?

  One of the best, one of the best at resting. You're probably the best wrestler that I've ever known.

• 3:11:44Speaker 02

  Bro, I used to be. You know the kind where like you can fall asleep, the people, well, yeah, now I'm a little bit spoiled where like, if someone has like, like if I go to hotel bed and the pillow's not the right thickness, you know, like it'll,

• 3:11:59Speaker 02

  come on, bro. Or the, or the, or the bed is like, kinda like the cheaper bed. Oh, yeah, because you stay in the luxury hotel.

• 3:12:06Jocko Willink?

  It's actually, here's, here's like a little, uh, thing I feel bad about. Sometimes I'll go and do an event for somebody and they'll put me in, you know, the presidential suite, right?

• 3:12:16Speaker 02

  Hell, yeah.

• 3:12:16Jocko Willink?

  And then I'll come down in the morning, like, how was the room? And I'm always like, oh, it was great, you know? But in my mind, I literally do not care at all.

• 3:12:25Speaker 02

  Bro, remember the time in,

• 3:12:26Jocko Willink?

  And I'm damn sure not going, well, you know, the pedal, pedal pillow was a little stiff or whatever it is you just said.

• 3:12:31Speaker 02

  It's too soft. No, okay, remember the time it was you, okay, you went somewhere like, and you stayed at, I don't know, you didn't have a hotel or something, so you stayed at like Jamie's rental house. I don't know. So you stayed somewhere like at someone's like unoccupied house.

• 3:12:48Speaker 02

  And you didn't have any blankets or anything, so you got like a shower curtain?

• 3:12:52Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah. It wasn't Jamie's unoccupied house.

• 3:12:54Speaker 02

  That was?

• 3:12:55Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:12:55Speaker 02

  Okay, okay. Bro, you told me that story and this was like well into your career. So it's not like you were just roughing it.

• 3:13:00Jocko Willink?

  That was like a year ago. Actually, no, there's Jaco Live. It was twenty twenty, just before.

• 3:13:05Speaker 02

  Bro, that story like, of course, made me laugh, but bro, I was suffering with you mentally. I was like, bro, no pillow, like, and you're just battling through it like, whatever, brother, I couldn't have done it. Bro, I would have canceled the show. A shower curtain and a rug or some something. I was like, bro, no way, bro. No, no way.

• 3:13:25Jocko Willink?

  Jack. All right. Well, you need rest. You're gonna need fuel. Another component.

• 3:13:29Speaker 02

  It's true.

• 3:13:29Jocko Willink?

  As they say.

• 3:13:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:13:31Jocko Willink?

  Of, uh, physical fitness, rest and, and get that fuel.

• 3:13:34Speaker 02

  Exercise, rest, fuel. That's the three components for getting stronger. Sir. So, Jaco Fuel. What do we got? Kinda everything now. We have pretty much everything now. So we'll go discipline. That's an energy drink. New paradigm. All healthy. No not healthy. All healthy. No sugar, no preservatives, no nothing. And tastes good.

• 3:13:54Jocko Willink?

  All upside.

• 3:13:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, all upside. Also, milk. That's, that's the extra protein. And you need extra protein when you're trying to build. It's hard to get all the protein you need, by the way. For real.

• 3:14:05Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:14:05Speaker 02

  How much protein you think you need?

• 3:14:07Jocko Willink?

  Uh, well, you know, I, I usually have seven ounces of protein per lean body, per pound of lean body.

• 3:14:15Speaker 02

  Ounces? Damn, bro.

• 3:14:17Jocko Willink?

  That's one gram per, right? That's like the standard one gram per. I know some people say point seven grams per. I say one gram per pound.

• 3:14:25Speaker 02

  Okay, so if you're, if you're going Jaco, uh, philosophy, that's, if you weigh two twenty. Two hundred twenty grams of protein.

• 3:14:33Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 3:14:34Speaker 02

  You got thirty grams of protein, one can of tuna. Thirty. So you need, how many of those?

• 3:14:41Jocko Willink?

  A lot.

• 3:14:42Speaker 02

  Freaking a lot in one day, bro. That's a lot of protein. Now, if you eat steaks, it's like.

• 3:14:47Jocko Willink?

  I'll have to work it out.

• 3:14:52Speaker 02

  If you just take that's like, like what, fifty? Fifty grams of protein?

• 3:14:56Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:14:57Speaker 02

  So you need four steaks in one day, bro. Get real. You know, not all of us can eat four steaks. But boom, you get the, you roll the milk into the equation, bro. Easy money. And it tastes good. It's like a dessert.

• 3:15:06Jocko Willink?

  It ain't gonna help you with your math, though, apparently.

• 3:15:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's what the discipline is for right there. That guy go. Anyway, well, we got some other stuff. Stuff for your joints, keep you in the game.

• 3:15:16Jocko Willink?

  Creatine. Creatine. Back on the creatine train.

• 3:15:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:15:19Jocko Willink?

  Right? That was a thing. And then, because it's so, it's so well studied. That's the cool thing about it. And the cool thing about it now is they're finding it's not just, not just for getting stronger. There's all kinds of, there's cognitive benefits, there's health benefits. So creatine, we just rolled out with that. Joint warfare, super krill.

• 3:15:40Speaker 02

  Immunity stuff.

• 3:15:41Jocko Willink?

  Immunity.

• 3:15:41Speaker 02

  It's kind of everything.

• 3:15:42Jocko Willink?

  You know what I have to, remember how this is a real thing, getting sick when you take a break? Remember that?

• 3:15:47Speaker 02

  Getting sick when you take a break.

• 3:15:49Jocko Willink?

  It was Huberman. If, I was telling Huberman, or he, he mentioned something about when your body kind of, when your mind stands down, like, oh, you have a break now? Your body's like, oh, cool, we can get sick now, real quick, just get, you know? And that happens, that has happened to me, like legitimately five times in, in the past 20 years where I had, okay, I've been going up, going hard, working really hard, and then I finally get a break and I immediately get sick.

• 3:16:15Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 3:16:16Jocko Willink?

  And so, I'm, you know, cranking the Cold War.

• 3:16:20Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:16:20Jocko Willink?

  To keep that stuff at bay.

• 3:16:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, all that anti-inflammatory stuff, man, is good, man.

• 3:16:25Jocko Willink?

  Uh, JacoFuel.com.

• 3:16:28Jocko Willink?

  Wawa, Vitamin Shoppe, the Military Commissaries, Hanaford, Dash Stores in Maryland, Wake Fern and Shop Right Circle K in Florida, HEB. Come on, HEB, man, you're in Texas, there you go.

• 3:16:42Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 3:16:43Jocko Willink?

  Murphy's Southeast and Meyer in the Midwest, that's where you can get this stuff. Go get stronger, get better, get healthier.

• 3:16:51Speaker 02

  It's true.

• 3:16:51Jocko Willink?

  Jaco Fuel. What else?

• 3:16:53Speaker 02

  Origin, boom, you got your Jiu-Jitsu Gis over there, that rash guards, got apparel, durable goods is what they call it.

• 3:17:00Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm. Jiu-Jitsu Gis.

• 3:17:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:17:03Jocko Willink?

  Train Jiu-Jitsu, that's my recommendation.

• 3:17:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, oh yeah, big time. Um, also, don't forget about the jeans, the belts, the boots.

• 3:17:13Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:17:13Speaker 02

  Don't forget about that kind of stuff. That stuff is like a big deal because nowadays it's hard to grab, get those, the stuff that's made in America, but for real, made in America.

• 3:17:22Jocko Willink?

  From the, from the dirt.

• 3:17:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:17:24Jocko Willink?

  From its inception as a thought, it's made in America.

• 3:17:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:17:27Jocko Willink?

  And when someone thought about it, it was in America.

• 3:17:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's true.

• 3:17:31Jocko Willink?

  So, there you go.

• 3:17:32Speaker 02

  OriginUSA.com.

• 3:17:33Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 3:17:34Speaker 02

  Also, Jaco has a store, it's where you can buy the stuff to wear, to represent on this path, discipline equals freedom. Good, remember the concept of good, bro, you wanna represent that all day? Hats, hoodies, all that stuff. Christmas is pretty much done.

• 3:17:49Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 3:17:49Speaker 02

  At this point.

• 3:17:49Jocko Willink?

  You missed it.

• 3:17:50Speaker 02

  You missed it, it's okay. You didn't miss nothing. JacoStore.com. Also, we got the Shirt Locker, which is a subscription. People like this. People are representing hard on the Shirt Locker. Where, you know, a little bit different designs. Always has to do with the path, though. Always. The designs always have to do with the path. Now, for you to understand, it's gonna take some, some mental work, but it's kinda fun. But anyway, a lot of people like it.

• 3:18:13Jocko Willink?

  Reward to it.

• 3:18:14Speaker 02

  There's a reward to it. It's called the Shirt Locker. It's on JacoStore.com.

• 3:18:18Jocko Willink?

  Is it, is it fair to say that the Shirt Locker shirts can be heavily layered?

• 3:18:23Speaker 02

  Heavily, heavily, heavily layered. Yes, it is fair.

• 3:18:27Jocko Willink?

  Right on. Awesome. Subscribe to the podcast. Go to JacoUnderground.com. We're recording a couple of those today. Eight dollars and eighteen cents a month. That's why, that way, we have our own platform. You can see what's going on with platforms right now. They're getting, people getting banned, some people not getting banned, people turning from this, turning to that. It's, it's mayhem out there. That's why we have our own platform, JacoUnderground.com. We own it. We, we totally control it, which is nice. So, if you can't afford eight dollars and eighteen cents a month, just email. [email protected]. We'll take care of it. Cause we, we, I want you to be free. We wanna be free.

• 3:18:59Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 3:19:00Jocko Willink?

  We want you to be free. So, there you go. YouTube channel, Psychological Warfare, FlipSideCanvas.com. We got a bunch of books. Check out JacoPublishing.com. Get Only Cry for the Living, Get Final Spin.

• 3:19:15Jocko Willink?

  All the other books I've written. Get them. Echelon Front Leadership Consultancy. If you need help in your organization, go to EchelonFront.com. We have some events coming up. Orlando, Florida, April 3 to 5, 2023. And Dallas, October 18 through the 20th, 2023.

• 3:19:36Jocko Willink?

  FTX Council Battlefield about, we did those Civil War podcasts, Civil War excursions. And those things are now selling out. So just if you want to go to Battlefield, go and sign up for Battlefield. Either come to Gettysburg and, and check it out or Little Big Horn, very awesome events. We have online training platform called Extreme Ownership Academy, extremeownership.com. This is leadership and life lessons that you can learn online. So check that out, extremeownership.com. And if you want to help service members, active and retired, you want to help their families, Gold Star families, check out Mark Lee's mom, Mama Lee.

• 3:20:18Jocko Willink?

  She's got a charity organization. And if you want to donate or you want to get involved, go to Americas MightyWarriors.org. Also, don't forget about Micah Fink, taking veterans out into the wilderness, heroesandhorses.org. And if you want to connect with us, well, remember you got Doc Parsley. He's on the interwebs, docparsley.com. He's got Instagram, Kirk Parsley. He's got Twitter, Doc Parsley. And for us, Echo is at Echo Charles. He's back on Twitter, by the way. Are you engaging?

• 3:20:53Speaker 02

  Sparsely, but yeah, like engage more, I think. I hope. I'm gonna try. Maybe.

• 3:21:01Jocko Willink?

  Well, anyways, I guess it's not really worth following Echo Charles on Twitter if he's got that kind of attitude. I'm on Twitter, I'm on Facebook, I'm on the Instagram, Echo Charles on all those things too. Echo is at Echo Charles. I'm at Jocko Willink. Watch out for the algorithm. It'll get you. Thanks to, again, to Doc Parsley for what he's doing and what he has done. And thanks to the people out there in uniform, pushing your body to the breaking point to protect our great nation. That's what Doc was talking about. You do that job, whatever you're doing in a uniform, and you're, you're sacrificing your body.

• 3:21:40Jocko Willink?

  To protect the country. So we thank you all for what you do, everyone in uniform. And the same goes for police and law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, border patrol, secret service, all first responders. You heard what Doc said about shift work, when you're staying up opposite hours. And every one of those jobs I just mentioned, you all do that. You also sacrifice your bodies to keep us safe. So, thank you for what you all do every day. And everyone else out there, yeah, look, you gotta push hard. But you do need to get rest. You do need to recover. That is critical for growth and for health.

• 3:22:23Jocko Willink?

  That being said, just do me a favor, don't lie to yourself. Because there's some people that are gonna take this and run with it. They're gonna make rest the priority of their existence. And I'm not saying, look, I'm not saying don't rest, rest, you heard me. You heard Doc, you heard Echo Charles chiming in.

• 3:22:41Jocko Willink?

  But when it's time to get up, get up. And use the day to make yourself tired, so you can sleep well. And the way you make yourself tired is of course by going out there and getting after it. And until next time, this is Echo and Jaco, out.