How to Build Immense Inner Strength | David Goggins

In this episode, my guest is David Goggins, retired Navy SEAL, highly accomplished ultramarathoner, best-selling author, and influential public speaker. David explains how he mastered his inner dialogue to build extraordinary levels of discipline and mental and physical toughness. He describes how confronting his early hardships, including physical and mental abuse, learning disorders, and obesity, became a practice of deep and excruciating self-reflection — eventually allowing him to transmute those experiences into a superhuman work ethic. This conversation is a unique window into David Goggins’ process in that it focuses both on the underlying science and how David manages and directs his inner dialogue. It’s a conversation that will inform and inspire anyone wondering how exactly to go about building discipline and confidence and reach their potential. Note: This conversation includes profanity. Some content might not be suitable for all audiences and ages. For show notes, including referenced articles and additional resources, please visit hubermanlab.com. Use Ask Huberman Lab, our new AI-powered platform, for a summary, clips, and insights from this episode. Thank you to our sponsors AG1: https://drinkag1.com/huberman LMNT: https://drinklmnt.com/hubermanlab Waking Up: https://wakingup.com/huberman Momentous: https://livemomentous.com/huberman Timestamps (00:00:00) David Goggins (00:03:39) Sponsors: LMNT & Waking Up (00:07:58) Learning, Studying & Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) (00:14:59) Writing & Learning, ADHD & Focus (00:20:35) Friction, Focus, “Conqueror’s Mindset” (00:25:16) Early Hardships, “Haunted” (00:30:48) Anger, Social Media; Growth & Challenges (00:34:41) Sponsor: AG1 (00:37:11) Stick vs. Carrot, Negative Inner Dialogue, “Stay Hard” (00:42:39) Inspiration, Characters & Self Image (00:46:09) Willpower & Anterior Mid-Cingulate Cortex (00:53:23) Friction & the “Suck”, Willpower (00:59:14) Building Willpower, Brain & “No Days Off” Mentality (01:09:54) Losing Weight, Challenge & Willpower (01:18:47) Self-Criticism & Discipline; Recovery; Stutter & Building Confidence (01:26:45) Relationships & Honest Conversations, People Pleasing (01:34:49) Self-Reflection & Empowerment (01:39:06) Unseen Work, Real Passion & Purpose, Medicine Cabinet Analogy (01:46:32) Feeling Lost, Self-Reflection & Individual Process (01:54:11) Challenges & Two Internal Voices, Misunderstood (01:59:32) Running, Smoke Jumping; Success; Willpower & Perishable Skills (02:07:04) Self-Reflection & Action, Distractions (02:15:27) Inner Dialogue; Failing Properly (02:24:59) Introspection & Unconscious Mind, Cleaning “Cupboards” (02:35:19) Zero-Cost Support, Spotify & Apple Reviews, YouTube Feedback, Sponsors, Momentous, Social Media, Neural Network Newsletter Disclaimer Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Andrew D. Huberman?

  Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life.

• 0:09Andrew D. Huberman?

  I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is David Goggins. David Goggins is a retired Navy SEAL who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. He's also a highly accomplished ultramarathon runner. For those of you that don't know, ultramarathons are distances longer than 26 miles, and in David's case, often longer than 200 miles. For his achievements in athletics, he has been inducted into the International Sports Hall of Fame. He also held a Guinness World Record for the most pull-ups completed in 24 hours. I should mention that not only was David a decorated Navy SEAL, but he also graduated from Army Ranger School.

• 0:50Andrew D. Huberman?

  David is also a highly successful writer, having authored two books, the first entitled "Can't Hurt Me" and the second entitled "Never Finished," both of which are bestsellers. David's books cover many topics, including his autobiographical description of what can only be described as an incredibly challenging child and young adulthood. His home was abusive, his school environment was abusive, he essentially had no positive resources directed his way. And in his twenties, he found himself to be obese, that is, more than 300 pounds, working a job he despised for minimal pay. And it was at that point that David began an inner dialogue that forced him to explore

• 1:32Andrew D. Huberman?

  the demons born out of his childhood, but also the position that he found himself in as a young man. And then began the journey to navigate that dialogue and transform himself into the Navy SEAL, the ultramarathon runner, the bestselling author, and the extraordinarily positive and influential man that he is today. As some of you may know, David has done various public lectures, he's a familiar face online because there are so many clips of him on YouTube, and he has done podcasts before. However, I'm certain that you'll find today's discussion to be very different than previous podcasts that David has been featured on. The reason is that, of course, we get into his accomplishments. We talk about the mindset that allowed him to achieve those things.

• 2:15Andrew D. Huberman?

  But today, David really lets us under the hood. He lets us into the form of inner dialogue that he has to embrace, indeed, that he has to grapple with on a daily basis, sometimes multiple times throughout the day and night, in order to impose the sort of self-discipline that he is so well-known for. We also get into some of the scientific mechanisms underlying willpower, and we talk about David's current endeavors that include, for instance, his own exploration of science and medicine, for which he has become an intense scholar and practitioner. I should mention that multiple times throughout today's discussion, you will hear curse words. Now, David and I both acknowledge that cursing isn't for everybody, and that cursing itself

• 2:58Andrew D. Huberman?

  is different than cursing at somebody. Nonetheless, we do realize that many people, parents perhaps especially, might not want to hear cursing. If you don't want to hear cursing, well, then this podcast episode is probably not for you. However, if you are comfortable with cursing, or if you can tolerate it, I assure you, today's discussion is highly worthwhile. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero-cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. And now for my discussion with David Goggins.

• 3:43Andrew D. Huberman?

  David Goggins, welcome. My man. Good to see you again, man. Great to see you. It was late 2016, early 2017, I believe, when you were in my lab at Stanford. Yes, sir. We did a little work later that day down in San Jose, and, gosh, see you everywhere, but it's not enough. So, great to have you here. Thanks for having me on, brother.

• 4:04Andrew D. Huberman?

  You embody discipline and doing hard things.

• 4:07Speaker 01

  Right.

• 4:08Andrew D. Huberman?

  I think we should just start right off with the.

• 4:10Speaker 01

  Yep. Let's just go there.

• 4:11Andrew D. Huberman?

  The bold truth. But right before we went hot mics.

• 4:15Speaker 01

  Right.

• 4:16Andrew D. Huberman?

  We were talking about learning.

• 4:18Speaker 01

  Right.

• 4:19Andrew D. Huberman?

  Right now, you're spending some time learning and doing things that I think most people probably don't typically associate David Goggins with.

• 4:26Speaker 01

  Right.

• 4:26Andrew D. Huberman?

  Why don't you tell us about that?

• 4:27Speaker 01

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

• 5:10Speaker 01

  paramedic that can really dissect exactly what's going on and figure out, you know, what medication goes where, just trying to, you know, just trying to learn, you know, the, the algorithm of what's going on, man. So I spend a lot of time with it.

• 5:22Andrew D. Huberman?

  I love the word algorithm because when I teach biology or try and learn anything that's related to biology and especially the human body.

• 5:29Speaker 01

  Right.

• 5:30Andrew D. Huberman?

  I need to know the nouns.

• 5:31Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 5:31Andrew D. Huberman?

  But it's the verbs that matter and that's really what you're talking about. Like, like just saying that, that sits there, that brain part there doesn't tell you how it all works together.

• 5:40Speaker 01

  No.

• 5:40Andrew D. Huberman?

  So what is your process for studying look like? Like if we dropped a, a camera in the room, but a microphone into that, into your inner dialogue.

• 5:51Speaker 01

  Right.

• 5:51Andrew D. Huberman?

  Gosh, wouldn't, wouldn't we all love that? But if we dropped a microphone into your inner dialogue, are you waking up, looking at the books and going, yeah, fresh day.

• 5:58Speaker 01

  Right.

• 5:59Andrew D. Huberman?

  Let's learn. Or is some of the same resistance that you've talked about coming up around physical?

• 6:04Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 6:05Andrew D. Huberman?

  Work, is that coming up from time to time?

• 6:07Speaker 01

  You know what? I was nervous at first. I'm gonna keep the mother, I'm, I'm gonna keep it real. I'm gonna keep it real. So. I'm not a real smart guy. And what I mean by that is, I was born with ADD. ADHD. My brain cannot retain information. I'm not some genetic freak when it comes to running, when it comes to lifting weights. I am absolutely the bottom of the barrel. And people will never believe me. And they can just, you know, whatever. Believe what you want to believe. So when you ask me this question about what does studying look like for me? I have to go over the same page over and over and over and over again. While Jennifer can look at that page, while she's, you know, quizzing me,

• 6:52Speaker 01

  she'll learn it right then as she's, she doesn't know anything about it. She will quiz herself or quiz me and learn it as she's quizzing me. It's the most frustrating thing in the world, how my brain works. So what I do is I literally sit there with a pen and paper, and I have my books. And I go through, have to write everything down every single day. I will study the same page until it's photographic memory from writing the same thing down. And then from there, I'll go back through and relearn again. So I'll learn the bulk of it. But then I'll go through and learn the small things within that.

• 7:35Speaker 01

  So if it's a medication, I'll learn what the medication does. First, I'll learn how to even say the medication. Because these medications aren't like, you know, like Albuterol. No, it's very big words, so I'll go through, learn how to say the name. Then I'll go through, learn what the dose is. Then I'll go through, and this is like every single day. It's not like, oh, I got it. Let's just go through. No, nothing is, I got it. Every single thing, so I can't wait to get in this conversation because everything I do in life, it sucks. Everything I do in life, it sucks. That's why when I was 300 pounds and 24 years old, it wasn't like it had some big epiphany. Of let's just go be a Navy SEAL.

• 8:20Speaker 01

  Let's lose some weight. No, I knew my entire life was gonna be a struggle. Which is why I just ignored it. And I said, I'm not even trying to jump off into this shit and learn how to read, how to write, how to memorize, how to become something I am not. But through that process, something happened to me. And I realized that's this why I feel sorry for no one. In this podcast, they're gonna really not like me. Because people are gonna think that I am maybe lying, or maybe fibbing, or exaggerating. No, I am literally, I was the lowest form on earth.

• 9:04Speaker 01

  No talent, no ability to learn. And I literally know what it is to be rock bottom and to build that up. So that question about learning is a pain in my ass. And I don't have to do it. So think about it, I'm forty nine years old and I'm a multimillionaire. I don't have to do anything. So all I thought about when I was growing up is, man, I can't wait till one day it gets to the point where I no longer have to do this stuff. But what happens, I got older, it became a way of living. So how I do every day is how I do every day. It's a, it's a discipline, it's a regimen, it's a, it's a, it was a choice I made. And the choice I made was, what are you willing to sacrifice?

• 9:50Speaker 01

  And what are you willing to give up to find every bit of who you are as a human being? And I was willing to give everything to do that. So studying is no joke.

• 9:59Andrew D. Huberman?

  I love that you're studying. I recall a few years ago, I heard some interview or podcast with you, and you just threw out like, I don't know what I'll do next. Maybe I'll be a scientist. And I, and I went, yeah. I was like, cause I knew, cause I know you a bit. And I see your work out there, but we had met before that. If you decided that, you were gonna do it.

• 10:20Speaker 01

  Right.

• 10:20Andrew D. Huberman?

  And learning medicine, which is what you're doing.

• 10:23Speaker 01

  Right.

• 10:23Andrew D. Huberman?

  Learning human physiology is so detailed.

• 10:27Speaker 01

  Very.

• 10:27Andrew D. Huberman?

  And people out there have to understand, when you look at a textbook and you see the veins and the capillaries, different colors, when the body's open, they're not different colors.

• 10:36Speaker 01

  Right, right, right.

• 10:38Andrew D. Huberman?

  So, I mean, some things have different color contrasts, but it's not like it's all labeled when you pop it open.

• 10:43Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 10:43Andrew D. Huberman?

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

• 11:01Speaker 01

  So, when I write it down, I write it down and I'm able to, I'm actually looking down at this table right now because I'm back to writing, so I'm actually there right now as I'm speaking to you. I write it down in a way that I'm memorizing page 69. So, I'm writing it down, so then writing it down and that page sync together in my brain. So, I'm looking at the book in my brain right now. So, like, that's just how it works for me. And I have to do it over and over again. So, that page is stuck in my mind, so I'm literally flipping through pages as I'm taking these tests. And I'm taking these national tests to become a paramedic or become an advanced DMT or whatever. I'm literally, as I'm taking that test, I'm going through and I'm like,

• 11:49Speaker 01

  now I'm flipping pages in my head of where that page was. And how I do that is just from how I, how I write it and how it's on the page. When I run, I can't recall any of it.

• 12:01Speaker 01

  I cannot, I cannot bring any of that because I'm running. How my mind is wired now is that everything I do is what I do. Because the focus it takes for me to, like right now, I'm running. I'm not like a great runner. I'm not like injury free. So, like my first 20 minutes of the run. I'm limping. I'm literally limping because I've had several knee surgeries. And my body was twisted. And so now it's untwisting. So people look at me, oh, it looks like he's limp, you know, like limping when he runs. I am limping when I run. My body's jacked up, so I'm focusing on how to get the best out of a broken body.

• 12:41Speaker 01

  So everything I do is a total focus on what I'm doing at that, at that point in my life.

• 12:47Andrew D. Huberman?

  So it seems like you've really trained away or somehow gotten away from the ADD that you mentioned. Because what you described is a deep trench, like a V-shaped trench. I'm imagining like there's a ball bearing and it's like, and it can only go forward in that trench.

• 13:01Speaker 01

  Right.

• 13:01Andrew D. Huberman?

  Or back and it goes forward. It's not like sliding around at the, like concave at the bottom, like a tension. So it's like you've trained that up. Is there a similar feeling when you're in the full focus of running versus full focus of studying? Is it kind of feel like, oh yeah, that's the same groove, but different thing? Or is it just completely different world?

• 13:23Speaker 01

  It's a completely different world. Like it's just, both of them for me, it's, it's suffering, but it's suffering a whole different way. Like when I was going through school, I'll never forget, I think I was in third grade. And back then, you know, ADD, ADHD wasn't like, you know, here's this medicine, here's this thing. They want to put you in a special school. So for me, I was so far behind in learning that their big thing was, let's just put him in a special school because he'll never learn. And through that process of like, I don't want to be in a special school. I don't want to be treated any differently. It really, like, I never took medication. I've never taken medication for this.

• 14:07Speaker 01

  That's why right now you see me looking right in your eyes. What the hell is, is, you know, is you've been saying right now? And that's why I don't feel bad for people who have ADHD, who have learning disabilities. And some are impossible because you just can't. But a lot of them you can. And but people don't want to go through the process of focus, of teaching yourself how to truly focus. This is where my message gets lost. It gets lost because I may say, you know, MF or F, you know, I may be, because that's the passion that comes out of me. Because that's, it takes everything for me to learn a sentence. So when I speak about David Goggins, I can't speak about David Goggins in a way that's

• 14:52Speaker 01

  just calm and cool. Because when I wake up, I know the journey that it takes for me to find my greatness. And it's hard. Nothing is easy. Nothing just like, oh, I wake up and I just do this, or I do that, or it just, no, I watch people every day go through life and it's so easy. For me to be where I'm at today, it takes every bit of me. So when I speak about it, and as I get going here, you'll start seeing me, the tempo will rise, the passion will come out, because I'm back there. I'm doing what I do every day to become a human being. And so, nothing is easy. Like, running is running. It sucks, but you have a choice to make. Do you want to sit down and go back to that guy you once were?

• 15:37Speaker 01

  No. So this is what it takes. It takes that misunderstanding of people, and they'll never get it because they were never David Goggins. So that is what it takes for me to do what I do. It may take you something differently. So for me, everything has to be in the study, and everything has to be into this, everything has to be, and everywhere I am, it has to be there. Me, focused where I am. That's why you're my second podcast I've done since Rogan, since the book came out. I don't have time for that shit. Because if I want to be great, I'm not trying to maximize money, or maximize people knowing me. I do these things because maybe someone out there will understand me, and get it, and say, I can grow from this guy. And others just won't.

• 16:20Andrew D. Huberman?

  Sounds like friction is something you're very familiar with. I just, it's a word just that I feel like is like, cast above us right now, in bold face, highlighted, underlined letters.

• 16:29Speaker 01

  Friction is growth.

• 16:30Andrew D. Huberman?

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

• 16:43Speaker 01

  Yes. And that is the thing that people don't, they don't fucking get. The biggest misunderstanding about David Goggins of all time, it's like, whether you believe in God or not, I do.

• 16:55Speaker 01

  He put this lab rat, which is me, on this planet. And said, "Let me fucking see what a beat-up, abused kid, who has, who can barely learn, barely learn, who has a twisted body, messed up, messed up genetics, sickle cell, this and that. Let me give him everything that pretty much disqualifies you from the military." But back then, it wasn't as strict. And, and let's put him in this and see what comes out of it. So to do that, friction. You don't wake up in the morning time and go to the coffee maker. Matter of fact, sometimes you don't even sleep. What it requires is when I'm at two o'clock in the, it's two o'clock in the morning, and my brain is thinking about a fucking drug.

• 17:40Speaker 01

  And I gotta get up and look in my book to see what that drug is, how I remember it. And this is every day of my fucking life. That's why when I train a fighter or I train someone, I'm like, "You have no fucking idea how great you really are." Because you are using such minimal, minimal of what you have. And if people can learn to focus, this is what's possible. While it may not be pretty, like people want to do a documentary on me. I go, "No, I don't want you to do a documentary on me." Because I will have normal, everyday people picking me apart. "Oh, his life is miserable." Who wants to live like that?

• 18:22Speaker 01

  He looks, it's crazy how he's, it's almost like he's sick, he's psychotic.

• 18:29Speaker 01

  The most frustrating thing in the world for me is when normal people judge a man like myself on what it really takes to extract greatness from nothing. It takes every bit of who you are if you choose that route. If you don't, Merry Christmas, do what you gotta do. But yeah, all these things for me, like, like I told you, man, I'm, I'm gonna keep it real. I, I'm not coming here to talk about like, you know, "Perform without purpose." Because I go through, when I write these books, I go through, I try to dumb down David Goggas. How can I give normal people, and I'm normal,

• 19:13Speaker 01

  but I found something that most don't want to find. How can I speak to people and give them something from this crazy psychotic brain that I've developed? How can I give them that? So I sit down with Jennifer for years and write down, "Performed out of purpose, callous your mind, armor your mind, the cookie jar, the accountability mirror, shit that people can fucking use in their lives." No, no. I'm glad it helps you, but the barbaric life that I live, that you have to live, the almost obsession that you must have to be great, you can't put that shit in a fucking book, bro. You can't put in a book. You can't. You can't write about it.

• 19:58Andrew D. Huberman?

  It has to be experienced.

• 19:59Speaker 01

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

• 20:09Andrew D. Huberman?

  Too gory.

• 20:10Speaker 01

  It's too gory, doesn't make sense for a guy that everything, every second of the day, he is trying to extract more from something. He's constantly thinking, he's constantly, constantly disciplined, never going off the path. Whatever is injured on him, he figures a way. It's a conqueror's mindset.

• 20:32Speaker 01

  And very few people, if any, can really understand what that is. Like, I'm almost fifty and I've been this way for almost thirty years. Like, what do you do for fun? You would never, like, these questions, I don't, I don't get them. I don't understand them. I don't, so, yeah.

• 20:52Andrew D. Huberman?

  I get asked that sometimes, what do you do for fun? Start listing off all this stuff like podcasting, reading, working out. But, so some of that resonates, but I think what's so truly unusual about what you're describing, your process, is that, you know, from go, it's hard.

• 21:10Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 21:11Andrew D. Huberman?

  And I have to ask, was being three hundred pounds, having, I'm using the words you've described.

• 21:17Speaker 01

  No, do it.

• 21:17Andrew D. Huberman?

  You've said it before. You had a tendency at one point in your life, early on, tell lies.

• 21:22Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 21:22Andrew D. Huberman?

  Try and get people's approval.

• 21:23Speaker 01

  Fly my ass off.

• 21:25Andrew D. Huberman?

  Crazy haircuts, attention-seeking, and, and yet, all of that triggered something that now is, you know, is extraordinary.

• 21:36Speaker 01

  Right.

• 21:38Andrew D. Huberman?

  Do you think those hardships were necessary to flip the switch?

• 21:44Speaker 01

  I don't know if they were necessary, but it was something that made me feel I didn't feel good. It was easy.

• 21:54Speaker 01

  The brain that I was given as a child, it was easy to go home and think about what, how do I want to be a freak today? How do I want to show up to school today and be a freak? It didn't require me going home and opening a book up saying, it's gonna take me all year to learn this fucking page. So instead of learning that page, I learned how to become a character. And maybe that character that I created, that 300-pound insecure guy that used to fake, fake it till I make it type of guy, you know, let me become your friend, let me lie to you until you like me type of guy.

• 22:34Speaker 01

  When you have any kind of, any manhood, womanhood, a human being, a soul, a spirit, any, I had no, I must have just this much pride. Cause that's exactly what opened the door for me. Cause every day you were a character, every day you were a clown, every day you opened that Spanish book or that science book or English book and you like, you looked at it, it was like, it looked like a foreign language. And you're sitting, where do I start? Where do I start? And obviously it was necessary, the more I talked about it, it was necessary, because what happened is I became haunted by the mere fact that this is my existence.

• 23:18Speaker 01

  And you gotta live with that. I lived with it for a lot of years. And so I sat back and said, okay, all right, I know what this takes. And when you sit back, as fucked up as I was, and I had a laundry list, a table like this of what I have to do to become just a human being that can make ends meet, that can make a thousand dollars a month, just to get there, was like, oh my God, dude, like, how they, I'm 16, 17, I can't read, I can't write. And I, oh my God, I'm so behind the power curve and my brain is about being depressed and my dad beat, my mom's not home and

• 24:01Speaker 01

  kids are calling me nigger at school and I'm like, oh my God, man, what the fuck do I do?

• 24:07Speaker 01

  And it wasn't like someone came around and said, hey, man, you can do this. This is all me. So people know, where does this cold man come from? I'm not trying to be cold. It's the reality of my life. It's the reality of a lot of people's lives. And so, yeah, that had to happen for me to be haunted, to be haunted, to pull out, to extract the guy that I am today. That haunting is something that's still there today. Because no matter how much you improve, no matter how much you change who you are, it's not permanent. You'll just wake up and say, oh, my God, man, you're you're David Goggins. You break records. You do this. You do that.

• 24:51Speaker 01

  People don't know, how are you, how are you able to just be so hard? Because I never turn the fucking thing off. Because once it turns off, I go right back to the David Goggins that is. And that's the guy that I'm constantly fighting every day. And it's a choice. And that choice makes you misunderstood. It makes you crazy. That's why I hate fucking social media. In 2013, people wanted me to write my book. I did it in 2018. Took five years. And the reason why I didn't do it, I set a table and Jennifer was there. This before I, I, she started working for me. I started dating or whatever. And all these people were there. And they're like, man, you gotta go on social media.

• 25:36Speaker 01

  And I was like, fuck you, man. Like, I'm not, that's, it's, it's poison. It's poison because I knew what I did to get where I am. And I'm gonna have these people, these normal, everyday people, fat, lazy, is exactly who I was, judging me. Because I know it. Because I was once them. All my hard work, all my dedication, I'm gonna have some normal dude, get his little brownies, little ding dong, ho ho, Twinkie, sit there with his coffee, picking me apart. Oh, he must be unhappy. He's just, you know how hard it is to put these shoes on every damn morning? And I'm gonna have you pick me apart? So, yeah.

• 26:21Speaker 01

  There's, there's, there's so much that goes into this that I was like, fuck this. I never want anything to do with it. So, anyway.

• 26:33Andrew D. Huberman?

  I'm not a psychologist.

• 26:35Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 26:35Andrew D. Huberman?

  But knowing your story from what you've written, what you've said on social media and elsewhere, podcasts and here now especially.

• 26:42Speaker 01

  Right.

• 26:43Andrew D. Huberman?

  It's amazing to me.

• 26:44Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 26:45Andrew D. Huberman?

  And frankly, it pulls at my heartstrings a little bit. I realize that's not what you're trying to do, but that in the course of your childhood and in your young adulthood.

• 26:53Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 26:53Andrew D. Huberman?

  That no one ever got between you and the world.

• 26:56Speaker 01

  No.

• 26:56Andrew D. Huberman?

  I forget where I heard it, that like if a kid has just one person that believes in them.

• 27:00Speaker 01

  Right.

• 27:01Andrew D. Huberman?

  You know, and I had my trials and tribulations, but I had great coaches, great mentors.

• 27:05Speaker 01

  Right.

• 27:05Andrew D. Huberman?

  I attached to them. I found them if they didn't necessarily find me.

• 27:08Speaker 01

  Right.

• 27:09Andrew D. Huberman?

  But I'm realizing that your situation was no one's ever said, hey, I'm gonna stand here next to you or get in front of you.

• 27:16Speaker 01

  Right.

• 27:17Andrew D. Huberman?

  Put a shield up.

• 27:18Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 27:19Andrew D. Huberman?

  And so it's almost like you've got these different ver- it's all you, but there's versions of yourself that like you knew, social media, like I don't know that I have the wherewithal in 2013, 14, 15, 16, 17.

• 27:33Speaker 01

  Right.

• 27:33Andrew D. Huberman?

  To get in front of myself while doing all this, because I've already got so much going on in here.

• 27:38Speaker 01

  Right.

• 27:38Andrew D. Huberman?

  Is that about right?

• 27:39Speaker 01

  That is right, but I had developed a lot of anger. And I still have it. It will never go away. For the normal human beings of this world. Because when you put yourself in the sewer like I was in, and please, if someone saved me, come out and announce it to the world. There was no one. There's no one. So when you know that, and then I'm sitting at a table with all these smart people who are telling me what to do and shit and guiding me through my life now. When I'm 40 fucking years old, you know, 2000, I don't know, 40 something years old, now I'm 49. And I'm looking at them all and they're now trying to guide me on what's right. On this poison.

• 28:24Speaker 01

  And so, yeah, what you say is right, but for me, it was more of, I know now. I don't need you to guide my future. I know what's good for me and what's bad for me. And for me, it took every bit of focus I could. And I know social media, that's why people love to go on there. Because they want to show you the good side of life.

• 28:50Speaker 01

  I'm not teaching good side of life. So I had to figure out a way when I came on 2016 of teaching you what life really is for the majority of us as hell. And so while people love to show you the cars and the house and the vacations and shit, all that's good, all that's happy. I'm gonna show you the side that I know most of you are going through. And people hide very well. I don't wanna hide anymore. I hid for 24 fucking years. That's why now when I told you, we can talk about whatever you want. Because as human beings, the one, the first thing we have to learn, I also stuttered real bad growing up.

• 29:33Speaker 01

  So if you hear me stutter every now and then, it's because that was part of my life also. So it's funny, human beings wanna show you the best side. And they wanna hide the worst side. For me, I'm gonna teach you how to be vulnerable. Cause that's the only way you fix yourself. You don't fix yourself by coming out here and me selling you some fucking books. That's why I don't have them, I forgot them. I'm glad people got something from the book. I want you to learn that the only way you grow is how to look at yourself and say, okay, like I did. Table longer than this, what the fuck I have to do to get somewhere? There was nothing good on there, nothing.

• 30:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, I love playing basketball, I left that out. That's something I love to do. I don't care about that, that didn't make the fucking list. Cause the list that I had to live by was the very list that was to get me at this table with you. To talk to you, to the normal human beings was I once was. About how you can get somewhere and how it looks. Looks very ugly. There's no fucking passion, there's no fucking motivation. There's no, oh my god, man, I fucking, this is no. It's every day of your life just doing.

• 30:56Speaker 01

  No passion, no discipline, no motivation. All these words, I hate people, I hate, that so many people fucking use these words now because it's watered. It's someone sitting in a room by themselves and they figure themselves out and say, "God, this is gonna fucking suck." Where's passion when you're 300 pounds? Where's the motivation when you can't read and write? Where is it? So how did this happen? I just fucking did. I just did. I said, "Maybe at the end of this journey, there'll be something there for me. If not, I can read. If not, I'm 185 fucking pounds." There's no magic potion, there's no, "Oh, let me wake up and look at some shit."

• 31:40Speaker 01

  No, all those words are overused. They're bullshit. It's all bullshit. Just do. You're living. How do you want to live? How do you want to die? How do you want to fucking be remembered? That's, that's it. That's it. Period.

• 31:59Andrew D. Huberman?

  The word haunted is ringing in my head.

• 32:02Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 32:04Andrew D. Huberman?

  I think it's such a powerful word.

• 32:06Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 32:07Andrew D. Huberman?

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

• 32:20Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 32:21Andrew D. Huberman?

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

• 32:28Speaker 01

  That's it.

• 32:28Andrew D. Huberman?

  There's no carrot. You're not imagining, "Oh, when I'm a paramedic, when the book is published." And obviously, you set those goals and you make those targets.

• 32:36Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 32:37Andrew D. Huberman?

  But it's all stick.

• 32:38Speaker 01

  All stick.

• 32:39Andrew D. Huberman?

  No carrot.

• 32:40Speaker 01

  Think about that. I'm waking up right now, studying, like I have a test tomorrow. I already passed the fucking test.

• 32:50Speaker 01

  Think about that. Every day in my life, that's what I must do just to retain what I learned. Four hours plus a day, I go through and do that. There's no stick, or there's only a stick. There's never been a carrot. Which is why, when I speak to people, I have to figure out a way to resonate with them. Because all I want to say to them is...

• 33:21Speaker 01

  Let me teach you the real life, how it really is. The reason why you're a loser, and the reason why you're not fucking making it, and the reason why you're trying to go to all these, I go to all these fucking conventions, speak all the fucking time. I look in the fucking audience, and these people sign up, sign up, sign up fucking every year to go to a convention, thinking they're gonna learn something fucking different. No, you're lazy, you know exactly what to do, exactly what to do. Because even me, in my state of, I can't read and write, I knew exactly what to do. It just sucks doing it. It sucks to do it. It sucks to wake up every morning of your life and say, "God, man, I'm, I'm not smart, so guess what I gotta do?

• 34:06Speaker 01

  I gotta, I gotta study the same shit that I got one of the highest scores in the nation on, and do it again, do it again, do it again." It's not just there, it's not just there permanently for me. So, yeah, it's all stick, it's all stick. The only carrot you have is like, maybe, maybe. Because whenever I take these tests that are real hard, in the back of my brain, it's like, "Good chance you're not gonna make it, Goggins. This ain't you, bro. This ain't you, you weren't born like this. This ain't you, the real you, bro.

• 34:46Speaker 01

  Study all you want to, but the second that fucking computer comes on with 150 questions, this ain't you, man." And somehow, comes back, I passed, passed again, passed again. But that real me back here every fucking time is saying, "That ain't you, bro. That ain't you." And I have to outwork that voice. When I'm taking that test and I get to a question, I don't fucking know the answer, I'm like, "Fuck, man." And then, say, "See, I told you, man, that ain't you. You 300 pounds, man, you sit at home, you figure out how to do your hair. That's what you do, how to come to school with the reverse baldness when you're 16.

• 35:30Speaker 01

  That's, that's, that's you." So, there is no get out of jail free card.

• 35:38Speaker 01

  This is why I say stay hard. Because when you weren't given the gifts, the only thing you can do in life is stay hard. And I know people cannot stand me. They can't stand this talk. This is all you can do. There's no magic pill or a magic potion. All you can do is outwork the man that God created or woman in you. And what that looks like is unfun. That's why I said, do not do a documentary on me. Because people will not see the truth. They will see what they want to see is, I don't want to live like that. Good, good.

• 36:22Speaker 01

  And you will live exactly the way you live now. Questioning who you are, wondering what is possible, wondering what you are capable of doing. That's how that looks. Or you can be me, which, am I happy? I don't know. Never thought about it. Don't really care about it. Because all I really cared about was when I looked in that fucking mirror, I saw a piece of shit. Happiness wasn't on the mirror at 16. Around 300 pounds. It wasn't like, oh my, I'm looking for happiness. No, I'm looking, looking at myself in the mirror and say, all right, motherfucker, you did it again today. You're a bad boy. Because that shit sucks. I have about a couple of minutes of that. When I got the carrot. The second I lay down to go to bed, the carrot's gone

• 37:07Speaker 01

  because I'm waking up all through the night to check the work I did that day. Did I get this drug right? Did I get this right? Did I get that right? What did I do? Oh, my God, fuck, I'm really losing it. Stick.

• 37:24Andrew D. Huberman?

  That stick is haunting you.

• 37:26Speaker 01

  Haunting me.

• 37:26Andrew D. Huberman?

  It's following you around. So no picture of Jordan on the wall. You're not listening to YouTube inspiration video. Those would be all your voice anyway. You're not listening to your top 10 favorite songs just to get rolling and then lace the shoes, hit the books. You're, it's all in here.

• 37:44Speaker 01

  All in there. I used to do that when I was fat, rocky. I mean, that was my thing. Round 14 was my thing. And as I got older and older and older, that started to go away. And I started to create.

• 38:02Speaker 01

  I had all these people that I used to watch. Rocky was one, Barnes, Elias from Platoon,

• 38:10Speaker 01

  Jack from A Few Good Men. You know, he's on the stand going crazy. I saw a lot of these characters that I looked at and I was like, man, I ain't got none of that. But they were characters.

• 38:22Speaker 01

  After a while, I lived a life so disciplined that everybody that I once looked to, these fake characters, I built that as a man. And when I was younger, I had this image in my mind of what does a man look like to me? And I got all these people who were badasses, characters. And in my mind, I became that. And that's what kept me going a lot, was I had this pipe dream of becoming a little bit of this and a little bit of that. Because when you have no parents raising you and you have no role models growing up, you, it's not daydreaming. You start to create a reality that,

• 39:11Speaker 01

  maybe I can be that. And after becoming this guy, that is the biggest thing I can ever do in my life, is I became that guy. That I once looked at all these guys and now I look at myself like, God, who the fuck can do that? I can't. But what it takes is a discipline that no one can ever even, they just don't, they don't understand it. They don't understand, everybody has the ability to do it, but they just don't want to. They want to keep asking questions and keep going to seminars. And the greatness is right in you. And that's why, once again, I'll say this a million times here, I do not feel sorry for you. I will not sugarcoat what I'm going to say to you.

• 39:57Speaker 01

  Because all of you know what I'm saying is the truth.

• 40:01Speaker 01

  Everybody knows this is the truth. This is what it looks like, and you know it too. You know it too. This is what, if, if you ain't got nothing, I hate to tell you what it looks like. It's ugly. It's not a documentary. It's not an HBO special. You ain't go watch it, but hey, man, you guys gotta watch this. No, it's like, oh, God, this looks like a train wreck. It's like a nightmare. This looks like this guy got, no. That's what it looks like. Hard work looks horrible. It's not motivating. It's not motivating at all. It ain't like Rocky round 14. He gets knocked down and goes like this to Apollo Creed. It looks like a man being stuck in a fucking dungeon. And there's no fucking way out. But you had the fucking key.

• 40:41Speaker 01

  But you refused to use it. And that's nothing motivating about that. So, yes, no documentary on David Goggins.

• 40:49Andrew D. Huberman?

  The real life. David Goggins is the, is the documentary. It's all, it's already being written. You're it.

• 40:56Speaker 01

  Right.

• 40:57Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah. I'm gonna share a little neuroscience tidbit.

• 40:59Speaker 01

  Love it.

• 41:00Andrew D. Huberman?

  But I think it's one that you'll appreciate. Uh, most people don't know this, but there's a brain structure called the anterior mid-Cingulate cortex. As we pointed out before, that's a noun. It's a name. It doesn't mean anything. We could call it the, the Cookie Monster.

• 41:14Speaker 01

  Right.

• 41:15Andrew D. Huberman?

  But what's interesting about this brain area is there are now a lot of data.

• 41:19Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 41:19Andrew D. Huberman?

  In humans. That's a mouse study. Showing that when people do something they don't wanna do.

• 41:27Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 41:27Andrew D. Huberman?

  Like add three hours of exercise per day or per week. Or when people who are trying to diet and lose weight resist eating something.

• 41:36Speaker 01

  Right.

• 41:37Andrew D. Huberman?

  When people do anything that they, and this is the important part, that they don't want to do.

• 41:41Speaker 01

  Right.

• 41:41Andrew D. Huberman?

  It's not about adding more work. It's about adding more work that you don't want to do.

• 41:46Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 41:46Andrew D. Huberman?

  This brain area gets bigger.

• 41:48Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 41:49Andrew D. Huberman?

  Now, here's what's especially interesting about this brain area to me. And by the way, I'm only learning this recently.

• 41:53Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 41:54Andrew D. Huberman?

  Because it's new data, but there's a lot of it. The anterior mid-Cingulate cortex is smaller in obese people.

• 42:02Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 42:03Andrew D. Huberman?

  It gets bigger when they diet.

• 42:05Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 42:06Andrew D. Huberman?

  It's larger in athletes.

• 42:07Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 42:09Andrew D. Huberman?

  It's especially large or grows larger in people that see themselves as challenged and overcome some challenge.

• 42:17Speaker 01

  Right.

• 42:19Andrew D. Huberman?

  And in people that live a very long time.

• 42:23Andrew D. Huberman?

  This area keeps its size. In many ways, scientists are starting to think of the anterior mid-Cingulate cortex not just as one of the seats of willpower.

• 42:34Speaker 01

  Right.

• 42:34Andrew D. Huberman?

  But perhaps actually the seat of the will to live.

• 42:39Speaker 01

  Now we're talking.

• 42:40Andrew D. Huberman?

  And when I learned about the anterior mid-Cingulate cortex, I was like almost out of my seat. And I've been in the neuroscience game since I was 20. We're the same age. And I was so pumped because I've heard of the amygdala fear, prefrontal cortex, it's planning and action. I could tell you every brain area and every, I teach neuroanatomy to medical students. But when I started seeing the data on the anterior mid-Cingulate cortex, I was like, whoa. This is interesting. And all the data point to the fact that we can build this area up. But that as quickly as we build it up, if we don't continue to invest in things that are hard for us, that we don't want to do. That's the part that feels so Goggins-esque to me that we don't want to do.

• 43:24Andrew D. Huberman?

  Like if you love the ice bath, yeah, I love the ice bath and you go from one minute to 10 minutes. Guess what? Your anterior mid-Cingulate cortex did not grow. But if you hate the cold water, if you're afraid of drowning and you get into water and put your head under. Then your anterior mid, and survive, then the anterior mid-Cingulate cortex gets bigger. But if you don't do it the next day, or if you do it the next day and you enjoy it, because hey, I did it yesterday. Happy me, Merry Christmas, as you would say.

• 43:54Speaker 01

  Merry Christmas.

• 43:54Andrew D. Huberman?

  Guess what? The anterior mid-Cingulate cortex shrinks again. To me, this is one of the most important discoveries that neuroscience has ever made.

• 44:04Andrew D. Huberman?

  Because it's that I don't want to do something, but do it anyway.

• 44:08Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 44:08Andrew D. Huberman?

  That grows this area. And it's almost like I have a friend, he's been sober 30 years from alcohol. And he always says, you know, the amazing thing about addiction is there's a cure. The problem is it only works one day at a time. And so you have to renew it every day.

• 44:23Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 44:23Andrew D. Huberman?

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

• 44:39Speaker 01

  Well, I love that because. That's how I've lived my entire life. I didn't know anything about that. But people go, man, you have such a strong will.

• 44:50Speaker 01

  It's something that you build. Like, I never forget, I was on a podcast one time, and this dude goes, "You were blessed with a strong mind." Like,

• 45:02Speaker 01

  "The hell you talking about? I was blessed with a strong mind." You, that's something that you have to develop. You develop that over years, decades of suffering, and going back into the suffer. That's why a lot of people who graduate Navy SEAL training, they were no, like, in my, I talk about very openly all the time. A lot of guys don't go, don't want to go back into that water. Don't want to go back into the hard stuff. It may be not even, anything hard, anything hard in life. Once you get through it, it's like you become a POW. Like, how many POWs you know want to go back to POW camp? None. When something sucks so bad in life,

• 45:47Speaker 01

  this is on this that we're talking about now, very few people want to go back. They're happy they graduated.

• 45:58Speaker 01

  I realized, I'm the same way. I don't want to go back.

• 46:03Speaker 01

  I have to go back. I must go back. Because that is exactly where all the knowledge of my life exists, was back there, and what you're exactly what you're talking about. Well, I didn't know anything about this. But how I grew a will was constantly doing these things. To now, it's just life. I wake up, while it still sucks, it's just life. You don't sit back and like, oh my God, like, I have days I don't want to do it, but I know I'm going to do it. I know from years of just doing it. So that's, that's beautiful. And this is why I came on here with you today. And I'm glad that you're talking about this. Because human beings need to hear this.

• 46:47Speaker 01

  They need to stop hearing these hacks on this and that. There's no fucking hack, bro. There's no fucking hack. Yeah, you may this and that and saunas and all this shit that they, yeah, it's great. There is no fucking life hack. To grow that thing, how do you grow it? Do it and do it and do it and do it. That's the hack. The hack is gonna fucking suck. And that's what I realized. That's what I realized. Life, that's why I wanted to come on here today. I didn't want to come on here and talk about no fucking passion and purpose and how to get the fuck out of bed and how to hit a fucking alarm clock. All this catchphrase bullshit. Because that wasn't how I lived.

• 47:33Speaker 01

  That wasn't how I lived. I lived, I woke up like every human being does and goes, fuck, man. I'm a fucking piece of shit today. How the hell is this gonna work out for me? And you fight that. And you fight that. You don't override it. There's no override button. It's the conversation in your fucking, in your head. So how do you do that? We don't have enough of these conversations about the real conversation that every human being is having. And they have no idea how to get out of it, but they do. It's that shit right there, man. Yeah, build your will. How do you build your will? Exactly what you said, man. Exactly what you said.

• 48:12Andrew D. Huberman?

  Well, I feel like knowing the name of something, anterior mid-Cingulate cortex, doesn't fundamentally change us. But one thing I like about biology is that willpower, if somebody feels they don't have it, feels like this thing that other people have. But everybody, unless their brain damaged, like a hole through their head, has two anterior mid-Cingulate cortex. One on each side of their brain. Everyone has one. They have two. So I feel like.

• 48:42Andrew D. Huberman?

  It's just a question of opening the portal. And the portal, what I, again, I'm gonna say 10 times and forgive me, is I think people go, oh, I do hard things, I do sets to failure, and then I do four straps. I love training with weights, I love doing sets to failure, I even like four straps. But guess what? I like four straps. So I could, I'll tell you, they don't build my anterior mid-Cingulate cortex.

• 49:03Speaker 01

  Right.

• 49:03Andrew D. Huberman?

  Cause I like to do it.

• 49:04Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 49:05Andrew D. Huberman?

  Anything you like to do is not gonna enhance this aspect of willpower. And it seems so obvious, once you hear it, you kinda go, oh yeah, of course. But I think you really close that loop for people. When you share what you're sharing today. And what you've shared elsewhere before as well, when you're trying to explain, the friction is the critical ingredient.

• 49:26Speaker 01

  Right.

• 49:27Andrew D. Huberman?

  And I think people think, oh, if it's effort, well, then I'm getting better. That's part of it, necessary but not sufficient, as we say in science. But the suck part.

• 49:37Andrew D. Huberman?

  The haunt, being haunted, the stick. They're really unpleasant terms.

• 49:42Speaker 01

  Very.

• 49:43Andrew D. Huberman?

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

• 49:45Speaker 01

  Very.

• 49:47Andrew D. Huberman?

  Those are the, those are the levers, those are the gears, and without those, this thing that you're talking about, David Goggins, as a verb.

• 49:56Speaker 01

  Right.

• 49:57Andrew D. Huberman?

  You know, I'd sometimes make the joke, but it's not a joke.

• 49:59Speaker 01

  Right.

• 50:00Andrew D. Huberman?

  Goggins is a name. And it's a verb. People go, I'm gonna Goggins that.

• 50:05Speaker 01

  Right.

• 50:06Andrew D. Huberman?

  Right? But that's, I think, again, I'm not a psychologist, but I think that's what you're talking about. The stick, the friction, being haunted. It's the suck part that grows this anterior mid-Cingulate cortex.

• 50:19Speaker 01

  So now you know why there's so many people that fail in this world. To figure out their purpose. Their purpose in life, where do I go? Because to grow that.

• 50:33Speaker 01

  Well, you may not look like me, how my daily life looks. It don't look fun.

• 50:42Speaker 01

  Don't look fun.

• 50:44Speaker 01

  So, it's a choice that people have to make in life. But what's so funny about it is even the richest of rich, who have everything, they always ask me this question. I feel like I'm missing something.

• 50:59Speaker 01

  I don't feel like I'm missing shit.

• 51:02Speaker 01

  I don't have what you all have. But you'll never in my life hear me tell you, I'm missing something. Everybody is. They're missing this feeling.

• 51:15Speaker 01

  I found it. Long time ago. I found it right there in that willpower thing. When you're nothing, nothing. And change yourself into something like me. You call it happiness, peace, whatever the fuck you want to call it.

• 51:36Speaker 01

  People are missing exactly what went on with David Goggins. Why don't you smile? I do. I do. But I figured something out. That's why I am never, you'll never hear me say, I'm missing something. I found it years ago. You find it

• 51:53Speaker 01

  in the suck.

• 51:55Speaker 01

  You find it in the suck, and you find it repeatedly in the suck. To the point where you know exactly who you are. Most people are missing something because they don't know who they are.

• 52:06Speaker 01

  They never examine themselves. They, they've never done this experiment on themselves. The lab rat, we're all lab rats. But you're also the scientist.

• 52:17Speaker 01

  You create your own self. Most people are missing something because there's so much trapped in there. I don't even want to say potential. I think that's a word used out too much, too. There's so much in you that God or wherever the hell you believe in, or if you're atheist, in you, that you have not unlocked. That you walk around with this gorgeous wife or great husband, all this money, like, God, I feel like I'm missing something. Yeah, because it's about seventy-five percent of you is still fucking in there.

• 52:49Speaker 01

  Still chained up because you just didn't want to find your willpower. Didn't want to find your soul, your will, your heart, your determination, your guts, your courage. And what that looks like, it looks scary, like your little scary lab I went in. Scary to wake up every day and say, I'm stupid, but I want to figure out a way to be smarter. Versus saying, man, I just can't do that. So you limit this box. So your box becomes so small of things you can do. My box wasn't even a box. It was a fucking little like li- li- little pinhole. And then through examining myself, getting some willpower, some courage, it became bigger than this table.

• 53:31Speaker 01

  But that's what we all do. That's why I wanted to come here today and talk to you about real shit. Not no fucking like hacks. There's no hacks, bro. It's you against you. You against you. And if you misunderstand that, you have a real problem. Real problem. I can understand you misunderstand me running down the street shirt off. Fuck this, yeah, yeah. I can, I can get it. I get it. If you misunderstand what I'm saying right now today, the problem is you. And you don't want to fix it.

• 54:02Andrew D. Huberman?

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

• 54:10Speaker 01

  True statement.

• 54:11Andrew D. Huberman?

  I mean, I could list off prominent names in the press, but those are actually the least interesting. What's probably more interesting as an example is all the ones we don't hear about because we never hear about them.

• 54:22Speaker 01

  Right.

• 54:23Andrew D. Huberman?

  They just dwindle and wither. Or I think there's this big category of people I'm realizing as we have this conversation today that they're not super successful, they're not struggling. They're like successful enough that they never have to. You can get to the point where you don't have to impose friction. You even said it.

• 54:45Speaker 01

  Right.

• 54:45Andrew D. Huberman?

  Your bank account is in a place where you don't really need to do all the things you do. Probably not even a small fraction of them.

• 54:51Speaker 01

  Do nothing.

• 54:52Andrew D. Huberman?

  Right. But you realize the stick and being haunted is the, uh, the fuel and the engine.

• 54:57Speaker 01

  Right.

• 54:58Andrew D. Huberman?

  And you'd be a, you'd be truly crazy to give that up. Because you, you've internalized all that.

• 55:03Speaker 01

  Right.

• 55:04Andrew D. Huberman?

  But most people, they're, they're good enough.

• 55:06Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 55:07Andrew D. Huberman?

  For them.

• 55:07Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 55:08Andrew D. Huberman?

  And so they don't actually want to be better badly enough in order to.

• 55:15Andrew D. Huberman?

  Start going rung after rung.

• 55:17Speaker 01

  Well, think about when you build willpower and think about how much I've built. Now that you know about this, this, I didn't know about this, but think about how much I've built. Everything I've ever done in my life, I didn't want to do. Everything, every day, I'm a lazy piece of shit. And I'm one of the hardest working people that ever stepped foot on this planet earth. And I'm saying that very proudly because I know what I do, not cocky. I'll tell you I'm stupid. And I also tell you the exact opposite of what I've done. It's the truth. It is the truth. So imagine how much I've developed in that timeframe. But this is the scary thing.

• 55:59Speaker 01

  Why most people don't want to do that, build that willpower is because it is scary.

• 56:07Speaker 01

  It unlocks a whole bunch of things about who you are and who you're not. And a lot of people don't want to go down that journey to discover who they are and who they're not. Because it's, it's not a pretty journey. I mean, I've gone down it, it's not like I went down it once. I go down it all the time. And when you unlock that, and you, you can't just turn it off. Like people say, hey, how, how come you haven't retired yet? I've built all this willpower.

• 56:35Speaker 01

  Do you think it's gonna let me just retire because my, my, my knees hurt? It's telling me every morning, I wake up like, man, I don't, my knees hurt, my, my legs hurt, my body hurts. But you can still run. So why aren't you running? If you can still run, there'll be a time when you can't lace them up anymore, but you can still run. So I still run. When the time comes, I can't run, the body will say, you just can't run. But if I can still do something, that willpower that I have created, it makes me do it every fucking day. And that's what they don't get. What builds a human being is you start with the small building blocks.

• 57:20Speaker 01

  And before you know it, man, you become something that you, it doesn't even make sense to most people. Because it's just who you are now. That's why I can still run at fifty with broke, with, at forty nine with broke down knees and broke down body. Because my body knows you still can, therefore I do. Second you stop, the, the willpower is gone. And that's beautiful. I'm so glad you brought that to me because I always wonder. What's this separation thing now?

• 57:47Speaker 01

  At twenty-four years old, I started building something that I didn't even know was gonna be what it is now at forty-nine. And that's all it was, was just that.

• 57:56Andrew D. Huberman?

  This structure, anterior mid-Cingulate cortex, has inputs and outputs from a bunch of places, but you'll probably not be surprised to learn that it's strongly activated when we move our body. When we don't wanna move our body.

• 58:12Andrew D. Huberman?

  I feel like it's like the David Goggins structure, right?

• 58:15Speaker 01

  It really is.

• 58:15Andrew D. Huberman?

  It is, and it also has strong connections to the dopamine reward pathway. And everyone goes, yay, dopamine reward. Everyone loves dopamine. I'm partially responsible for people knowing a bit more about dopamine. But dopamine's badly understood. Everyone thinks dopamine, dopamine hits, it's about reward. It's about motivation and drive. And there are pain inputs to the dopamine centers of the brain. No one talks about that. Everyone's like, oh, you want the chocolate, you know? Chocolate, sex, cocaine, all that. Yeah, that's all true.

• 58:46Speaker 01

  Right.

• 58:46Andrew D. Huberman?

  You release dopamine. Pain releases dopamine. The anterior mid-Cingulate cortex can trigger the release of dopamine in response to this thing that we're calling friction. And that's a learned thing. That's something that no animal or human being comes into the world learning. We all are averse to pain. And like pleasure, like sugar fat. Don't like hot surfaces.

• 59:09Speaker 01

  Right.

• 59:10Andrew D. Huberman?

  But this is a structure that learns. It has neuroplasticity, the ability to change throughout the entire lifespan. And here's the part that I think, again, this is just neuro nerd speak for what you already know and have done and exemplify. Is that it, people will say, oh, it has plasticity, you can change it. But guess what? It has plasticity in both directions. It can grow, but just as easily as it can grow, it's like silly putty, it can shrink.

• 59:35Speaker 01

  Right.

• 59:36Andrew D. Huberman?

  So it requires constant upkeep.

• 59:39Speaker 01

  Right.

• 59:40Andrew D. Huberman?

  And that answer isn't one that people are gonna like.

• 59:42Speaker 01

  Nope.

• 59:43Andrew D. Huberman?

  They're like, give me the energy drink, give me the supplement, give me the

• 59:46Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 59:47Andrew D. Huberman?

  Give me the sauna protocol that's gonna make my anterior mid-Cingulate cortex. Someone out there right now is going, wait, if I took transcranial magnetic stimulation and I stimulate. Yeah, you'd probably, actually, they've done that. They've stuck a little wire during neurosurgery into this structure. This is actually discovered by a colleague of mine, Joe Pervizi. stimulate and the patients go I feel like there's a storm coming and they go oh is it scary and they go no I want to go through it they come off the stimulation and people are like this is the seat of what we're talking about

• 1:00:19Speaker 01

  right exactly

• 1:00:20Andrew D. Huberman?

  and it learns so the fact that you kept this brain structure I'm convinced if we image your brain it'd be large and it would be larger in two years a year but this is the no days off rationale because it can grow and it can shrink

• 1:00:37Speaker 01

  I know what you're saying right now I didn't know any of this and I never and I always talk to people I wish I could just put this on paper and you're saying it in a way that people can understand I could never put into words on what I built and the power that is within all of us but you put it so like in a scientific way most people like for me he's just crazy that's why I don't like talking about it man I know I'm not crazy I know what I had to do to get where I had to go people look at it as crazy because they're people that just if you can't imagine yourself doing something if you can't imagine yourself

• 1:01:20Speaker 01

  doing something the person that's doing it is crazy because in your mind the logic behind it it doesn't compute therefore you have to give somebody a title and a title for me is usually he's crazy he's this he's that no no for some reason me wanting to be somebody so fucking bad in my life I created that and I've been trying to figure out years of my life trying to explain to people but even though you're explaining it now

• 1:01:55Speaker 01

  this is the easy fucking part them listening to this shit is the easy fucking part the part that why there'll always be the ones of ones is because putting that practice

• 1:02:10Speaker 01

  Put that into actual work? No, man. No. No. That's where the demons come in. That's where you're like, I, I, I don't want to be better. I don't want to be better. This is what it takes to be better? I don't want to be better. So everybody's, that's why there's a lot of average. And it makes me so fucking mad. Every day I walk this earth and I see average all over the fucking place. And they want to ask me, how did you do it? I can't tell you how, because you're not gonna fucking, you're not gonna do it. You're not gonna do it. You're just gonna, you, you're gonna continue being, because every day you wake up, like he says, like, get the coffee, make the, make the pancakes,

• 1:02:54Speaker 01

  kiss the girl, kiss the kids. You wake up, right to work. Immediately your mind is in action. No one must do that. No one. And I don't blame them. But don't be mad. When you're laying there in your fucking bed and you're in the fucking hospital and you're seventy, eighty, ninety years old and you're thinking,

• 1:03:15Speaker 01

  man, I feel like I didn't fucking do something. Because you did. You didn't do it. You didn't do shit. You may have lived a great life, man, but you're always gonna feel empty inside. I don't feel empty. So call me what you want. There's not one empty bone in my fucking body. Because I have figured out that really, the magic potion, at least to my life, and it's very rewarding.

• 1:03:42Andrew D. Huberman?

  People like to talk about what they used to be able to do. I hear this a lot. You know, you should have seen me in high school. I always laugh.

• 1:03:49Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:03:50Andrew D. Huberman?

  Okay, got it. And it's not just guys. You should have seen me working out in high school. I was super fit. People will look back to a time where they felt like they were capable of something and now they're not. And you kind of want to just grab them and go, wait, that was you then, it's you now. And, but people tend to think about how the conditions. That were around success must have been part of it. And you can understand why. It's like, it's very rational. I was in that situation, I was successful. I'm in this situation, I'm not. That was the past. This is the present. Ergo, capable, right? You see how people get into these loops. And as you mentioned, you spent the first 20 years of your life in extremely challenged circumstances.

• 1:04:34Andrew D. Huberman?

  And then you can see how people get to a point where, like, everything feels hard. Like, when you're 300 pounds, I haven't never been 300 pounds.

• 1:04:43Andrew D. Huberman?

  But I can't imagine it feels good to get up and move around.

• 1:04:46Speaker 01

  It's defeating.

• 1:04:47Andrew D. Huberman?

  I got a friend, he's in excess of 300 pounds. We've been trying on him for years, but no, no win. And he's got crazy psoriasis on the back of his calves. And he, he actually smells bad sometimes because he, he can't wash as well as he would. He's big, big.

• 1:05:04Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:05:05Andrew D. Huberman?

  And it pulls on my sympathy.

• 1:05:07Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:05:07Andrew D. Huberman?

  You know, but life is very hard for him and getting worse. He's a young guy with a lot of medical issues now, for obvious reasons. And so I think people like that think, well, it's already hard. Why would I make it harder?

• 1:05:21Andrew D. Huberman?

  Your message is a little different, and you have the life experience.

• 1:05:25Speaker 01

  It's a lot different.

• 1:05:26Andrew D. Huberman?

  You've been there. So for me, saying, oh yeah, lose weight, you know? I was a skinny guy who got to be a less skinny guy. So I don't really have a foot to stand on.

• 1:05:40Andrew D. Huberman?

  What do you say to those people who are like, listen, I'm, getting up in the morning is hard. Trying to not dissolve into a puddle of my own tears and my own misery is hard.

• 1:05:51Speaker 01

  Do you know why people connect with my book so well? For some reason, God put me in almost every fucked up situation on the planet Earth. So when I talk to people, it's not sugarcoated. Because I, I'm not saying it from, I was a 75 pounds my whole life.

• 1:06:08Speaker 01

  I don't say much to those people. Maybe you're a piece of shit. Maybe you're, you wanna be nobody. Maybe you're happy exactly where you are in life, because obviously you are. Maybe you don't have the determination to be somebody better than who you are. And if you wanna live with that, I'll support you in that. If you're good with being who you are, and every day you wake up, and every day you smell like shit because you can't wash your body well, and your skin's messed up because your health's so bad, and you can't put your clothes on, right? You need help with that. You need help, like, when I was there in Atlanta, I needed help wiping my ass.

• 1:06:46Speaker 01

  That makes you feel good?

• 1:06:49Speaker 01

  Nothing I can say to you. If every day you wake up with this... See, people are haunted. But they obviously like horror films. Because they keep watching the same fucking movie. I don't like horror films. A lot of people like horror films. So I don't say much to them. I say exactly what I said to you. Right there. Because I was once you. I didn't like horror films, so I changed it. Some people are just... They become, like you said, it gets real small when you're lazy and you're fat. Your will...

• 1:07:23Speaker 01

  Their will is so small that they don't have any, and you can't give it to them. There has to be something. This is, this is what I'm talking about now. Because this isn't a hack. This has to be in you. Something in you has to wake up. And usually, the only person that can wake it up is you.

• 1:07:44Speaker 01

  Sometimes you can read a David Goggins book, because I was all this shit and then a lot more of fucked up.

• 1:07:50Speaker 01

  But if you don't have a little flame, you know, just that, just barely, you're done. I can't, I can't light it for you. And that's the harsh reality of this life that I wanna get across so fucking bad. You can watch me, you can watch you, you can watch fucking Rogan and Cameron Haynes, all these motherfuckers. You can go to Tony Robbins' fucking bullshit. Do all this shit. Do all this shit. If you, you could keep going back and keep spending money and spending money and spending money with no results. You can wonder, wow, maybe let me go try out David Goggins. He ain't gonna fucking help you. You have to explore, examine the insides of yourself.

• 1:08:35Speaker 01

  And what do you really want out of life? Your friend, a lot of people out here, just don't fucking want it. So guess what?

• 1:08:43Speaker 01

  Have fun with your life.

• 1:08:46Speaker 01

  Go from three to three fifty to four hundred to four fifty to five hundred. Because you don't want it.

• 1:08:54Speaker 01

  And that's the harsh reality. I can't give you shit. You can't give him shit. He can give you ideas, but at the end of the day, when I was losing the weight,

• 1:09:05Speaker 01

  I had to miserably wake up every morning in the cold, because it was Indiana, November is when it started. I was miserable. This is your new life.

• 1:09:19Speaker 01

  Take it or leave it. There's no happiness about it. There's no peace behind it. It sucks. It just fucking sucks. And that's the one thing, if I could teach anybody, anything, it just fucking sucks. And it's gonna continue to suck. And then one day you get to a special part in your life, that it might get a little bit better. But to lose the weight, you have to lose, my friend.

• 1:09:48Speaker 01

  Sorry. It's gonna suck every fucking day, because then when you're three hundred pounds, you're gonna go out to lose weight? You could probably get injured. So then you gotta work on the injury, and then you get even more depressed. This is what I went through. And then you're hungry, because now you're depressed. It's just a vicious cycle. And if you're not strong mentally, and you have no willpower, you're gonna continue falling back in this hole versus the man that sits back and goes, alright, motherfucker. This is why I cuss, because this is what is in me. This is what it took for me to be me. Sorry. It didn't take, hey, okay, we're gonna do this today. No, this fucking really sucks. This is real, dude. This is real.

• 1:10:30Speaker 01

  And every day, I'm setback, I'm setback, I'm setback, I'm setback. So this is what I would tell your boy. This is exactly what I tell them. Every day you wake up, you're gonna probably be set back for the first four weeks before you lose to significant weight because of the mind is gonna be fucking with you the whole time. There's no dopamine. There's no dopamine in there at 300 pounds. You got nothing. Your hormones are shot. You have to envision something that is more powerful than you.

• 1:11:01Speaker 01

  Something has to get you out of bed. And you have to create it. It has to be false. Cause you're not it. You're a fat piece of shit and that's the reality of it. So you have to create

• 1:11:15Speaker 01

  a false reality to live in that just to get to work on yourself. That's the reality.

• 1:11:23Andrew D. Huberman?

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

• 1:11:40Speaker 01

  That's awesome. I mean, they, they want it.

• 1:11:42Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah, just one, one guy, I won't out him, but walked up to me at a party in 2019, July 4th party and said, uh, I'm a pile. And I go, what? And he goes, I'm a pile. Look at me, I'm 60 pounds overweight. I go, do you drink? He goes, every day. I go, how much? He goes, a case. He goes, I smoke a lot of weed. But he's successful in other areas of his life. And so I said, well, here's what I know. Quit alcohol and weed for you. You know, I'm not telling people what to do. Don't eat until 2 P M. Get on a exercise bike and pedal in the morning. Like someone's chasing you with a poison dart. Till you wanna puke. And I was kinda half joking.

• 1:12:22Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:12:22Andrew D. Huberman?

  And then, uh, two months later, he was like, I haven't had a drink. I lost 30 pounds. He lost that 60 pounds, he never went back. Now he's, he's super fit. It's amazing. So some people flip the switch. He is very self-critical by nature.

• 1:12:37Speaker 01

  That's what.

• 1:12:38Andrew D. Huberman?

  He's super self-critical.

• 1:12:40Speaker 01

  Yep. That's what flips the switch.

• 1:12:42Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:42Speaker 01

  Think about it, man. We know what to do. We don't need Angie Huberman to tell us what to do. We know what to do, every one of us. That's why he flipped it so fast. Cause he knew what to do. He didn't go by your exact protocol. He didn't go by the exact, no. He knew exactly what to do.

• 1:13:07Speaker 01

  And you just saying some shit to him. It woke something up, but he knew what to do. And that's the thing that people need to get that. You know what to do, why aren't you doing it?

• 1:13:18Andrew D. Huberman?

  And I'm talking about myself now. You know, those modes of just kind of passive consumption. They're so easy to wash over us. I used to have this thing and I'm fighting this now. Cause I knew we were gonna have this conversation today where I like to start things on the hour or the half hour.

• 1:13:33Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:13:33Andrew D. Huberman?

  Worst practice in the world.

• 1:13:37Andrew D. Huberman?

  For me. Because if I miss that half hour. I'm like, ah, it's 12:33. I'll start at 12:45.

• 1:13:44Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:13:45Andrew D. Huberman?

  Ah, it's 12:45. I'll start at 1:00. I just lost time.

• 1:13:50Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:13:50Andrew D. Huberman?

  And then, and so this is so stupid. Right? And the other day I was like, man, I gotta tell David about this. Cause my new thing is I start no matter what time it is.

• 1:13:59Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:14:00Andrew D. Huberman?

  If I wake up in the middle of the night, I got a friend, he paints in the middle of the night. I'm like, you're an insomniac? He's like, I don't know, I just do it. Then sometimes he goes back to sleep, sometimes he doesn't. Everyone's got their thing, but I thought about this, I'm like, I'm no more am I gonna say I'm starting at 1:00. Cause I, I know me. If I miss the 1 o'clock, ding.

• 1:14:15Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:14:15Andrew D. Huberman?

  And then my pen's not hitting the paper, or my not typing on the keyboard. I'm not gonna do it. Like that, that's a self-admitted weakness.

• 1:14:23Speaker 01

  I love it, man. I had that for a lot of years.

• 1:14:28Speaker 01

  I know I'm gonna do it.

• 1:14:30Speaker 01

  That's the haunting part. Is that it's going to happen. It has to happen. And that's a fact. Like, there's no get out of jail free card, bro. None. Like, that is a life that I don't know. I don't, I don't have that.

• 1:14:50Speaker 01

  Ability. Or I have the ability, I don't have the, um.

• 1:14:55Speaker 01

  I'm not good enough, smart enough. I'm not talented enough. To do that. Some people are. Some people can start at 1:00. Some people don't have to start at all. If you lack talent, you can't sit back and say.

• 1:15:14Speaker 01

  I'll start in half an hour.

• 1:15:17Speaker 01

  I can't do that. I gotta start now. And then after I get back from starting, I gotta start again. And then when I get done with that run or that study session, if it wasn't good enough, I gotta go back again. Cause repetition is what taught me everything. So you can honestly outwork anything. But it's that you obviously are a very talented man.

• 1:15:40Andrew D. Huberman?

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

• 1:15:47Speaker 01

  You're amazing.

• 1:15:48Andrew D. Huberman?

  Gathering, organizing and disseminating information, something I've been doing since I was a little kid. I used to give lectures at school on Monday about stuff I learned over the weekend.

• 1:15:56Speaker 01

  See, check that out.

• 1:15:57Andrew D. Huberman?

  But they took me to a psychiatrist. We're the same age. Back then, if you got sent to a psychiatrist, people thought you were crazy.

• 1:16:03Speaker 01

  I was at one.

• 1:16:04Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:16:04Speaker 01

  I was at one.

• 1:16:05Andrew D. Huberman?

  Exactly. So I remember feeling like a freak. I also, I didn't have a stutter, but I had a grunting tic. It comes back when I'm tired. And the only thing that helped that was hitting my head on something, shaking my head, which is why skateboarding was good, cause I'd slam and I'd feel like, oh, feel good. That's not healthy. You know, that's not good. Or just work, work is what gets it out. It's like, it's like a RPM are high. You know, anyway, that's me, but yeah, I think certain things over time, I feel like talent or gifts or whatever you wanna call them. But there are many things that are exceedingly difficult for me. And I, and I have learned from your example. I know that you are very, both humble and very clear that like you don't have,

• 1:16:48Andrew D. Huberman?

  you say, I don't, you're not gonna get it by examining you, but I think the way you're sharing today and the way you shared it on other podcasts before, there are pieces that really help people feel into the process of what you're talking about. Today, we're elaborating on it, I think, a lot. You know, this notion of being haunted in the stick.

• 1:17:08Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:17:08Andrew D. Huberman?

  I mean, of course, of course, now it makes so much sense why you don't wanna talk about sleep or rest or recovery. Cause that's, sure, that's important. I've heard you say, yes, you sleep, yes, you eat, yes, you hydrate, yes, you, you will stretch your psoas or whatever, but it's funny how that becomes the viral message.

• 1:17:25Speaker 01

  That's why I said fuck that today.

• 1:17:26Andrew D. Huberman?

  But that's not the unique, that's not the, the unique message that you carry. Like, anyone can talk about that. So do I have that right that you're acknowledging sleep is important, recovery is important? But that's not what you're about?

• 1:17:39Speaker 01

  You have to forego something. Yes. Ice baths, saunas, sleep, nutrition. All this shit's so fucking important, dude. I don't have time for some of it.

• 1:17:53Speaker 01

  To get, to extract, or had to extract, something had to give. Like you talk about you when you were younger, you would, you would give these speeches and stuff. The same age, you were giving speeches, I was trying to figure out how to say "the" without stuttering. And I realized as I got older, that all these things are important.

• 1:18:14Speaker 01

  But for me to stop stuttering, I got to build fucking confidence.

• 1:18:19Speaker 01

  And speech therapy didn't help that, nothing helped that. I have to forego a lot of shit to be as fucked up as I am to build confidence. For me to stand in a fucking room of 10,000, of one person and not, and be like, oh, put my head down, let me look around, let me, let me, um, read these paragraphs first, and then before I read the paragraphs, because they're calling me next, let me just leave the room, kind of stutter.

• 1:18:47Speaker 01

  That's a miserable life. And that's one of many things I did, besides lying, besides being insecure, besides being immature, besides being fat, besides being one of the only black kids in my school, it's a lot of things I had to overcome to gain confidence.

• 1:19:04Speaker 01

  And in doing so, a lot of that had to go, a lot of it. So I became the guy that became once again misunderstood. You only sleep four hours a day, two hours a day, sometimes you don't sleep at all? Like, what's this, and what's this, and what's this? I know it's all important.

• 1:19:22Speaker 01

  I can't, something's gotta go. For me to get confidence, because confidence is the building block of where I'm trying to go. For me to gain confidence in myself, this fucked up kid has got to do a lot of fucked up shit to gain confidence. And along the way, the stutter went away and I gained confidence. And now my life is a little bit more...

• 1:19:44Speaker 01

  There is no balance. There's no balance. It's a little bit more what it should be for a lot of people, but there'd never be balance because confidence is something that you constantly, confidence and belief you're building every day. And so something's got to give.

• 1:20:03Speaker 01

  And I'm willing to forego a lot of things to have that because I know that is, that is, if you want to give somebody kryptonite, take that shit away from them. So, yeah, I don't sleep sometimes and sometimes I don't eat the right way and sometimes I don't do this and do that and whatever, man. But you put me in a room of 10,000 people anytime of the day and I walk in there thinking I'm the best motherfucker in here because I know what it took to be on this stage. And a lot of people will not do that. So that's what it takes.

• 1:20:33Andrew D. Huberman?

  There's a question I've been wanting to ask you since we started and I thought about coming in here and I've been thinking about in the weeks ahead of this and I'm going to just come clean and say I don't exactly know how to ask the question.

• 1:20:44Speaker 01

  Just ask it.

• 1:20:44Andrew D. Huberman?

  So it's about relationships.

• 1:20:46Speaker 01

  Oh, do it, man.

• 1:20:48Andrew D. Huberman?

  So I know in myself that my discipline is much higher when it's just me, but that's because I had certain things early on, but then I had, I was a terrible student, barely finished high school. But then when I got serious, I got serious by did that by staying away from everybody. And anyone who's ever had a relationship of any kind, but in particular romantic relationships knows that yes, you can derive tremendous support from those. Like you got this, baby, you can go in here like, yeah, I got this. She said, I got this, you know? It feels great to finish something and share with someone, share a meal, you know, get to hug it. But there's another side to all of that.

• 1:21:29Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:21:30Andrew D. Huberman?

  That I'd like to learn more about from you, which is there's a warm body next to you in bed in the morning. You don't want to get up. They also have needs. You've got your mission that people sometimes need things from us, but also oftentimes the people that love us most, that truly love us and that want to support us, don't understand this thing. And they're the first people to tell us like, listen.

• 1:21:59Speaker 01

  Take a day off.

• 1:22:00Andrew D. Huberman?

  And then this whole cycle, at least in my head, goes off like you just want a vacation. And then it's almost like a paranoia. I'm not saying anything nice about myself right now.

• 1:22:08Speaker 01

  Right, oh, good, man.

• 1:22:09Andrew D. Huberman?

  Former girlfriends are gonna be like, yeah, like, you know, they remember. And so support of people close to you is critical. This could be friends, could be romantic partners, whatever. But they're also, the knife cuts both ways.

• 1:22:22Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:22:22Andrew D. Huberman?

  It can be the thing that can really undermine this thing that you're talking about. Because the people that care about us also want to see us comfortable.

• 1:22:29Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:22:30Andrew D. Huberman?

  They want to see us happy, they want to see us peaceful, they want to see us wake up from a great night's sleep. And they want things too.

• 1:22:35Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:22:36Andrew D. Huberman?

  So how do you untangle that whole bit?

• 1:22:39Speaker 01

  Well, it's funny, man, I'm unbalanced, but I'm mostly unbalanced towards the family side. People don't get about me. I start being unbalanced, I get all my stuff in. But what I do is I make sure that my family has everything they need. Everything they need. Those who want to be part of my family. Some don't. Some family members don't want to be part of David Goggins. I get it, I got it. That's life. Those who are part of my family? I give them everything they need. So they can leave me the fuck alone. I make sure you're happy as fuck, because I gotta go to work. And I don't mean smoke jumping. I don't mean running, I mean all of it.

• 1:23:21Speaker 01

  It takes every, I can't have you in my fucking shit. Can't. So I know for me to have a family? I gotta make sure that you realize I'm gonna give you everything you need. So when you start bitching at me, I'm gonna say, look, hang on. I dedicated my life to give you everything you need. I need this time right here. For me to be the best I can be, because this journey started without anybody. And I make sure everybody knows that who comes in my life. I've been left, think about it. I was left alone at a young age to figure this shit out.

• 1:23:57Speaker 01

  I figured it out for myself and it's been very successful for myself. No one's gonna come in here and fuck with my shit. That's why I make sure I will take care of whatever you need. Whatever you need from me, you got it. Money, house, my love, my support, I'm gonna give you everything you need. That said, I do it the highest level possible. And I'm saying it with Jennifer in the next room. So please come in and say something if it's wrong, Jennifer. I don't give a fuck. Say what you gotta say. So then when it's time for me to go to work, I expect you to do the same for me. Cause it takes every bit of me to do what I have to do. So I make sure that I'm very unbalanced for my family.

• 1:24:39Speaker 01

  So I can be exactly that unbalanced for myself. And that's how I do it. I let people know right up front. I'm not what you want in a man. I guarantee that. There's gonna be a lot of late nights, a lot of early mornings, a lot of times where I get to be by myself. Thinking about the process that is next in my mind. I can't have aggravation, can't have this, can't have that. There's a lot of things, but I let them know up front. I'm very vocal about that. Sometimes relationships work for me, sometimes they didn't. But that's who I am. One thing I did wrong in my life was I tried for so many years to please people.

• 1:25:22Speaker 01

  And I did it at the expense of myself. I was leaving a lot in the tank and when you do that, you stop living. But the person in your life is happy as fuck. Cause you're giving them everything they want. They have, their, their, their life is full, but you feel empty. And that's not a relationship to me. So for me, it's important that you know exactly who I am because this is what life made. And I'm not trying to change it because I just figured it out. So I'm not trying to compromise David Goggins. I would never, ever compromise David Goggins.

• 1:26:05Speaker 01

  That doesn't mean I won't give you what you need and what you want and what you desire. But I don't need money, I don't need fame, I don't need shit. So I give it all away. What I do need is to make sure that that willpower is worked on every fucking day and every night for the rest of my life. Because that's the one thing that's gonna keep me feeding you, keeping you where you need to be. Because once that willpower is gone, 300-pound David Goggins, he may not be look like it, but I will walk around with it. So the things that are important to you in life, you must do always, or you're nobody. And that's how I handle relationships.

• 1:26:47Andrew D. Huberman?

  Amen to that. Something I could personally work on is that upfront clear communication. Because I, it resonates that feeling of, like, there's something inside that's not getting worked out, that I was, when I'm on my own, it's, it's, it's a lot easier. But then, of course, wanting relationships and family, I think that's a healthy part of being human, too. And obviously, you've worked it out. So I appreciate you sharing that. I don't think I've ever heard you talk about it that way before.

• 1:27:12Speaker 01

  People are scared of that, man. People are scared of that conversation with their wife, husband, girlfriend, boyfriend. But why are you scared of it? Why are you scared to tell a motherfucker, your wife, your husband, who you are?

• 1:27:27Speaker 01

  Who you are, exactly who you are. And that was the problem I had, that's a problem that a lot of us have in life. No one knows who you really are. No one knew who I really was. I went to a school where there were a lot of black kids. A lot of black kids didn't want to be in special ops. I never talked about special ops to the black kids. Why? I was wondering what, I'm not gonna fit in. Because that's not what they do. A lot of black kids don't do that kind of shit. So whatever I wanted to do, no one really knew the real me growing up. Because I never want anybody to know the real me. I was always afraid of what you might say, or how you're gonna feel, or whatever. You got feelings.

• 1:28:11Speaker 01

  You have a life that you have to live. So it's important that whatever's on your mind, you let that person know, therefore you're giving them the option to be with you or not. This is who I am. If you don't like it, that's good, man. I got it. But this is David Goggins. So that honest conversation is very important, man, so everybody knows where they stand. That person may not be for you. And that's all good.

• 1:28:37Andrew D. Huberman?

  This world could use a lot more of that upfront, completely honest conversation. I feel like so much of the world's problems are because everyone's dancing around these issues.

• 1:28:46Speaker 01

  Takes a lot.

• 1:28:47Andrew D. Huberman?

  Recently in the news, seeing people losing their job because they won't say something publicly. You can tell they kind of want it. It's like, and people just, I think, deep down, really crave the direct message, like, what are you about? What are you not about? But I think now everyone's afraid of getting canceled. It's a big deal, right? You know, getting canceled, that people think, oh, I can't work if I am who I am, or if I'm not pretending to be somebody else, then, you know, silence is considered, you know, agreement. You know, there's all sorts of complicated stuff. And I do feel for the generation coming up, because we didn't have social media.

• 1:29:22Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:29:22Andrew D. Huberman?

  And all of that. That getting just walled off from that, there's a real benefit from just not paying attention.

• 1:29:28Speaker 01

  People love to lie. People love to lie. You know, I thought I was the only person, like when I was growing up, I thought I was the only person that lied. Because I lived in the bubble. And people love to lie about who they're not. They love to lie about who they're not, dude. And that's, for me, the reason why I'm so vulnerable, and I'm so real and honest. Find somebody to come out, tell me I'm lying about my fucking life. And for me to come where I came from, and have the resume I have now, you know the confidence you get? How, I don't care who, you gonna, you gonna judge me? You gonna judge me? What have you done in your life? So, me being so honest and so upfront and so truthful,

• 1:30:12Speaker 01

  that came with me finally figuring out who I was, but also conquering David Goggins, the demons of David Goggins. Therefore now, you're just an open book. You look at somebody looking right in the eye, tell them exactly who the fuck you are. You walk away. I'm good, bro, 'cause I know exactly what this journey took to get here. And that gives you a fire and a passion that people can call you nigger, they can call you, if you're lesbian or gay or bisexual, call you whatever the fuck you want. If you put yourself in the fire, and you come out every fucking day like this, fresh it off, not scared to go back in there again, come on, man. Your truth is real. You come out every day, man, with a way of talking to people that people don't have,

• 1:30:58Speaker 01

  'cause there's no truth behind them. And the truth is a starting line. When you sit in an ugly mirror and say, "I'm this, I'm this, I'm this, and this", you finally started your life. Maybe forty years old. Maybe forty years old, five, six kids, wife. The second you look in that mirror, and you say, "I'm this, I'm this, I'm this, I'm this, I'm this", well, basically, "I'm not this, I'm not this, I'm not this, I can't this, I can't do this", I'm all these insecurities, your life finally started. And once you start that life, man, the truth comes out big time, 'cause you know I care. So that's the problem. Most people just don't wanna have that conversation. It's a point where they can go onstage with a million people and say,

• 1:31:40Speaker 01

  "I'm all this, and have a good day, see ya." It's empowering, it's very empowering.

• 1:31:47Andrew D. Huberman?

  I feel like the, the way we're educated in school, but also outside of school, is we're trained as human beings, as these young brains, to try and figure out how to get positive feedback from other people.

• 1:31:58Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:31:58Andrew D. Huberman?

  It's like we're, we're like little dogs.

• 1:32:01Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:32:01Andrew D. Huberman?

  You have a bulldog.

• 1:32:02Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:32:02Andrew D. Huberman?

  I had a bulldog. Saw the picture of your bulldog. She's great.

• 1:32:06Speaker 01

  Charlie Dog.

• 1:32:07Andrew D. Huberman?

  They're an amazing species.

• 1:32:08Speaker 01

  They are.

• 1:32:09Andrew D. Huberman?

  I think of them, economy of effort.

• 1:32:12Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:32:12Andrew D. Huberman?

  Or amazing breed, excuse me. They're an amazing breed. Economy of effort. They don't do anything unless it's necessary. It's kind of the exact opposite of everything we're talking about. It's kind of interesting and they're kind of hedonist.

• 1:32:23Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:32:23Andrew D. Huberman?

  Now, it is true that they will, they'll die to protect you.

• 1:32:27Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:32:27Andrew D. Huberman?

  And it's an instinct. I saw that with Costello. I'm sure that's.

• 1:32:30Speaker 01

  Saw it with Charlie.

• 1:32:31Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah, it's an instinct. But if they're not in that position, if there's no need to exert effort.

• 1:32:37Speaker 01

  They're resting.

• 1:32:38Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah. So, your bulldog's resting for you.

• 1:32:40Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:32:41Andrew D. Huberman?

  Got it.

• 1:32:41Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:32:42Andrew D. Huberman?

  So, you don't need to rest, because?

• 1:32:44Speaker 01

  Active recovery Charlie.

• 1:32:45Andrew D. Huberman?

  Perfect.

• 1:32:46Speaker 01

  That's it.

• 1:32:46Andrew D. Huberman?

  Perfect. That's gonna be your answer from now on. People go, does he sleep? Does he rest? I go, no, he somehow worked it out so his bulldog does it for him.

• 1:32:52Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:32:54Andrew D. Huberman?

  But we're sort of indoctrinated into this way of being from a time that we're young, where of course, praise feels good, right? Someone tells you, hey, I like that shirt, or good job today, or nicely done, or for me, because I like growing up in a big pack of friends growing up, and I was never the greatest athlete. Wasn't terrible, wasn't great, etc. Like a fist bump, or like a feeling cruded up, and you're just like, yeah. But you've talked about this before in reference to the SEAL teams. We both know a lot of people in that community, and the team's component is a big part of it for a lot of people. And it's a wonderful thing.

• 1:33:29Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:33:30Andrew D. Huberman?

  But there's a danger to that

• 1:33:34Andrew D. Huberman?

  dopamine hit, for lack of a better way to put it, from what we can only derive when it's coming from outside. You're talking about being able to either say, good job, but also like, just look to one's own personal history and say, I've done hard things and I can do it again and again, because I do it again and again and again. You're talking about parenting yourself.

• 1:33:59Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:34:00Andrew D. Huberman?

  Inspiring yourself.

• 1:34:01Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:34:02Andrew D. Huberman?

  Scaring yourself, all of that from the inside. So very different than the way we're raised, which is to figure out how to get the biscuit.

• 1:34:11Speaker 01

  It's funny, man. People want to know how I'm always motivated.

• 1:34:16Speaker 01

  It's the unseen work, which you just said is a true statement. Those are false dopamine hits that people are giving you, man. There's no belief in that. These are teamwork dopamine. Like, I'm out running at two o'clock in the morning, one o'clock in the morning, in the gym, long sessions, by myself. You, that's real. How am I able to just extract dopamine, the good dopamine whenever I want? Man, I've trained ninety-nine percent of my life alone. No one pat me on the back. I did all of the work alone.

• 1:34:54Speaker 01

  And while I'm still hard on myself, I know what I did. So whenever times get bad for me, people, all this, who's gonna carry the boats and all? That's real. I hate that people know me for that guy, cuz that guy is not every fucking day. Like, when they see me, they want that energy. That's not me every day. I can extract it immediately when I need to, because when you train alone, and I lived alone for so many years in this misery, and you're able to get out of it by yourself, I can take myself to such a level of real, real passion and purpose and like, the feeling I get is something that I can't even explain by myself. I don't need anyone. That's why, that's why people come to me to motivate them.

• 1:35:40Speaker 01

  No one can motivate me. I have a resume full of fucking motivation. That whenever I'm down, like, oh, hang on, motherfucker. Oh, you know, you know the truth. You know the truth. You know the darkness of the fucking dungeons and the fucking demons that fly. You know, and then from there, it's like, okay, you were there. You know this. There was no one there to pick up the rucksack, to pick up the boat, to pick up the log, to go in there. It was you. It was you. There was no pat on the fucking back at three hundred, at, at two seventy-five, at two fifty, at two twenty. No, that was you. So those things that come out of me, that extract from me in the darkness, people are looking for that pat on the back. Where is it? Oh, I don't need it.

• 1:36:25Speaker 01

  Because what I've done is in the fucking unseen work, I've built Frankenstein. So whenever shit gets nasty, David Goggins goes, you had nobody anyway, motherfucker. So see how I'm talking to myself right now? That's me. That shit fires me the fuck up. That shit makes me fucking nuts. You had nobody anyway, motherfucker. Look around you. There was no fucking team. It was you. There was no weight loss program or mom and dad waking you up saying you can do it, you can be better. Trying to build belief. You built belief when you had nothing. Rock bottom. You did that, so as times get hard for me,

• 1:37:11Speaker 01

  the truth comes out. And my truth is powerful as fuck. It's real. It's tangible. I feel it. It comes out of my brain as I speak about it. I'm reliving every single dark moment of my life to be here. So that is what people don't get. That is what motivates David Goggins is the unseen work, but everybody needs that pat on the back. They need that training partner. They need that accountability coach. I don't hear that shit. And neither do they. But it's what we've trained ourselves to believe that we need.

• 1:37:51Andrew D. Huberman?

  It's almost like there's this pill on the shelf. I'm speaking in analogy.

• 1:37:55Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:37:55Andrew D. Huberman?

  And we take it and we get jazzed up. We're like, yeah. But there's this other medicine cabinet behind there and it's in us. You're saying the real medicine cabinet is inside.

• 1:38:06Speaker 01

  Oh, yes. When you continue to overcome. And I had so many obstacles to overcome. So it's actually a benefit to me, but the benefit is not like a benefit like that. You have to have the courage and the patience to overcome and overcome. Before you know it, man, you have a whole medicine cabinet, but there's no medicine in the motherfucker. There's no pre-workout. I don't take none of that shit. All I gotta do is flip my brain, put my finger in there and say, okay, that's a good one. So all I gotta do, man, I got the Rolodex of just like, go fuck yourself, Goggins and, oh, but you won. Let's do that one today. There's nothing I need.

• 1:38:49Speaker 01

  And this is the thing that people don't get about David Goggins. I can't teach it in a one-minute video.

• 1:38:57Speaker 01

  We all have this ability to have our own medicine cabinet. But unless you go in there and put the medicine in there,

• 1:39:09Speaker 01

  it's always gonna be fucking empty, man. You're always gonna need the pre-workout. You're always gonna need to, I don't drink coffee. I don't do ca- I don't do none of that. I don't need, I can run for seventy hours, and I had before. No caffeine. I got all this wonderful shit that I overcame on my own, by myself, in the darkness. That man, when it's cold, I'm hot. When it's hotter, I, I, I can feed myself all the time. And that's why when people say, man, why aren't you missing anything? I can't explain it to you, man. Can't explain it to you. You'll, you'll never understand. That's why I don't do all these podcasts, dude.

• 1:39:50Speaker 01

  I got, I, I, I love you, man. That's why you, my first book, you did a blur for me. That's why I'm here. I love what you're doing for people, man, but I can't explain this. I can't. I can't explain this because people don't wanna do this. They don't wanna do this, man, but it's, I don't know, man, I get, I get jazzed up even talking about it, man, because so many people think my life is just so, oh, God, his life is horrible. Like, don't, don't follow him. He's crazy. Really?

• 1:40:19Andrew D. Huberman?

  But there are a good number of people, I would say, and that's an understatement, that actually do. I think it, I, what I'm hearing today, and it's really sinking in, is that a great many people either partially or completely misunderstand you.

• 1:40:32Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:40:33Andrew D. Huberman?

  I'll put myself in the partially category.

• 1:40:35Speaker 01

  Big time.

• 1:40:36Andrew D. Huberman?

  Because I thought it was about just a forward center of mass, carrot, carrot, carrot, carrot. But it's the stick.

• 1:40:45Speaker 01

  It's the stick.

• 1:40:46Andrew D. Huberman?

  And it's being haunted. And, you know, I do have examples from my own life, which is not what today is about, about being really afraid and then turning things around.

• 1:40:54Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:40:55Andrew D. Huberman?

  My biggest fear is getting comfortable.

• 1:40:57Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:40:58Andrew D. Huberman?

  I do not have as much of a stick-oriented approach, but today's conversation's changing the way I think. I'm not gonna step away from this and think, okay, there are twenty-five neural circuits that can explain ten of the things that David's talking about, and what I'm thinking about is the fact that everybody has a brain. They have a mind. Forget the brain. The brain's just the physical structure, but what that manifests, what that creates, is the mind. And everybody has that. So I do believe that everyone has the capacity to do what you're talking about at some level.

• 1:41:33Andrew D. Huberman?

  I also will be the first to confess that I think you're a highly unusual. Let's just say, maybe even N of one, as we say in science, sample size of one.

• 1:41:45Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:41:46Andrew D. Huberman?

  Somebody who has created this process for themselves and keeps them in this, themselves in this forward center of mass with the stick battering the back of their head all the time.

• 1:41:55Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:41:57Andrew D. Huberman?

  Highly unusual.

• 1:41:59Andrew D. Huberman?

  But this internal medicine cabinet that you're talking about building up true confidence, not needing anything from the outside. I think, I like to think that people want that. They want to be known. They're afraid, but that they want to be known for who they really are and that you're describing the path to do this.

• 1:42:18Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:42:19Andrew D. Huberman?

  And I will say, I'm immensely grateful that you're talking to us this way today about things that you've talked about before, but we're hitting it a little differently. I like to think.

• 1:42:27Speaker 01

  Very different.

• 1:42:28Andrew D. Huberman?

  Because

• 1:42:31Andrew D. Huberman?

  what you're talking about is a process. It's verbs. It's all verbs.

• 1:42:34Speaker 01

  All action.

• 1:42:36Andrew D. Huberman?

  And it's not about success. It's more actually about keeping that friction dialed to 10.

• 1:42:43Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:42:44Andrew D. Huberman?

  And that I, no energy drink, no supplement. People often misunderstand me. They think, you know, like I'm big on people getting sunlight in the mornings. They set their circadian rhythm and get better sleep. It's like, et cetera. But then people always think they go straight to the supplements.

• 1:42:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:42:56Andrew D. Huberman?

  What should I take? You know, and then of course, people think I'm all about supplements. Supplements are one piece for me, but it's like tiny fraction compared to the doing, the do's and don'ts.

• 1:43:06Speaker 01

  That's why I didn't want to talk about that today. That's why I'm glad we're talking about this. This is it. This is it. Like the brain is the most powerful weapon in the world.

• 1:43:15Speaker 01

  And it's crazy how a kid that wasn't real smart, I was forced to go only internal. External had to go away. The external world had to go away. And living so deep inside myself, it was me in this brain. And figuring out how this thing works. And it's so many people are doing exactly that. The supplements, the this, the that. I agree, it helps. But once you figure out your, your brain, you become unstoppable to almost anything. Yeah, you can't beat death, you can't whatever, whatever. Your brain's amazing.

• 1:43:59Speaker 01

  Once you feed it the right conversation, the right mental nutrients, the right mental supplements, the right, the right internal dialogue at the right time, with the right hit, with the right proof of what you've done in the past, and you send it right to the right circuit, dude, you're a fucking beast. A beast. But once again,

• 1:44:28Speaker 01

  you just can't read about it. You can't sit back and be a theorist. You have to be a fucking practitioner. And in that practice is where that becomes proof positive. And what I'm saying is like, God, David Goggins, he's blowing my mind. What is this? He's not crazy. And so many people,

• 1:44:51Speaker 01

  a lot of people,

• 1:44:56Speaker 01

  have listened to me the right way and they come back and they're like,

• 1:45:00Speaker 01

  I'm totally on board. I, it, it happened. It happened, like. It'll keep going, man, if you keep doing it. But that is it, man. There's no sun.

• 1:45:11Speaker 01

  There's no glory. There's no carrot. There's no victory. But there is all of it in one. I just can't explain it real well to people, man. But what you get at the other end is something that you're not. You're always found. You're never lost anymore. Doesn't mean the journey's easy. Doesn't get any easier, but you're always found.

• 1:45:34Andrew D. Huberman?

  I love that. I just want to hover on that for a sec. The same way we hovered on haunted and the stick.

• 1:45:40Andrew D. Huberman?

  I think people feel lost. I've certainly felt lost at times in my life.

• 1:45:46Andrew D. Huberman?

  Many times and yeah, there's that thing. I don't think there's a neuroscience or a psychology term for it. Someone will say, put it in the comments and say, oh yeah, that's what so and so said. But like you said, we're not trying to be theoretical here. We're trying to be practical. The business of finding yourself. And knowing like. But it's sort of like, I'm safe because I'm in danger and I've been in danger before and I got myself out. It always, always seems to come back to verbs. Again, I don't have a language for this. You know, for once I'm lost for words. There's like, it's, it's about a process, the algorithm. And you, and the reason here, I'm just kind of trying to make sure I'm understanding things correctly. One of the reasons why it must be uncomfortable for you to be who you are publicly.

• 1:46:30Andrew D. Huberman?

  Is because people want us focus on the running or the swearing. And by the way, the swearing is, is welcome. I'll tell you, I came up through laboratories where all three people I worked for.

• 1:46:43Andrew D. Huberman?

  Swore a lot, but there was one rule. I couldn't swear at people. So my graduate advisor, brilliant woman, unfortunately she died early. They all died early.

• 1:46:53Andrew D. Huberman?

  I'm the common denominator. I had that internalized for a long time. Anyway, she said, but if you swear at people, you're out.

• 1:46:59Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:46:59Andrew D. Huberman?

  But you can swear as much as you want. So that's, that's the rule I have. It's like you swear as much as you want, just don't swear at people. And if you swear at people, better be ready to fight.

• 1:47:06Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 1:47:07Andrew D. Huberman?

  I'm definitely not going to fight you. So you can swear at me, get away with it. But the fact of the matter is. That it must be frustrating. That people, because I know people go, oh, it's all about supplements and ice baths. Listen, I like supplements, I love supplements and ice baths, but that's not the full picture. They just a gravitational pull. It's the swearing, it's the running. It's his feet that are all messed up. It's the fact that he got a Triton. He's this seal guy.

• 1:47:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:47:31Andrew D. Huberman?

  We talk about that too, right? You know, and there's a gravitational pull for people and they're missing like the, that's like the tip of the iceberg is what I'm realizing. I'm realizing that today, thanks to the way you're phrasing things, because the bigger vessel is all in here. And as you said, how do you put that in a book?

• 1:47:48Speaker 01

  It's impossible.

• 1:47:50Andrew D. Huberman?

  Because it's highly individual.

• 1:47:51Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:47:51Andrew D. Huberman?

  You do it your way.

• 1:47:52Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:47:52Andrew D. Huberman?

  And you're saying everyone needs to go figure out how to do it their way for them.

• 1:47:56Speaker 01

  Yes. And the thing about being misunderstood is very frustrating. More than I can even imagine. I can't even express how frustrating it is. When

• 1:48:10Speaker 01

  the cussing and everything comes from a place of real. I can't explain what I do without it. The passion comes out of me, it's almost like speaking in tongues. Because when you put that much work and people go, oh yeah, there's been this basketball player, this football player, this

• 1:48:29Speaker 01

  dude. No. No. Everything. Everything is work. Everything and people don't believe it. So when I speak,

• 1:48:44Speaker 01

  the motherfucker and the fuck and shit.

• 1:48:49Speaker 01

  That is what it took for me. What it takes for me. The anger, the passion, the

• 1:48:59Speaker 01

  the the jaw dropping, just it takes that. Because I'm not that. This is how I look at it, man. What built this guy? Let's imagine being in the coldest water you can possibly take. I always go back to Hell Week with this. I hated the water. Hated it. You're sitting there locked arms and you're in the water all the time. And they're bringing you in and out of the water. In and out of the water.

• 1:49:29Speaker 01

  When you have this dialogue in your head, and these people are judging me off of a freaking one-minute video. And you're constantly, your whole life, when you figure it out, 24, I gotta, I just gotta, this fucking gotta, and this is just gonna suck. Every day is gonna suck. And live like that to be better. And I put this way, I'm in the water, the water's going over my head, the Pacific Ocean, you know it's freezing. February, cold as shit. Been through three hell weeks.

• 1:50:02Speaker 01

  For you to constantly win, win, win, when this voice over here, the real you, is saying, "Get the fuck out of here. Go. You're nobody. You've always been nobody." And it's true. People don't hear that. That's a true voice. That's the real reality of David Goggins at 24 years old. It's not a false reality. And then you had to create another voice over here that is saying, "You're better than that other voice." And you're in the freezing cold water that both voices don't want to fucking be in.

• 1:50:44Speaker 01

  But you win. And goes from the water to the studying, to the running, to the losing weight, to how you eat, to how you function as a man. Every day of your life, you're winning these battles. And then I have normal people who only have one voice. Never created the second voice. The winning voice is the second voice. They have one voice. And that's just, "I'm a piece of shit." And that's all they hear. And then they judge people like me, who are out here trying to be better. It's something that I can never really...

• 1:51:26Speaker 01

  It's a frustrating thing for me. Cause I know, I know the majority of people. I know what goes on in the brain, cause I studied the mind more than, almost more than you. Cause I wasn't, I'm a practitioner, so for you to be a piece of shit and come out of that, you don't just come out of it. You spend decades studying your mind and the human mind, on how it functions in good environments, bad environments, stressful environments, patient environment. You studied all because you had to put all this together to create the mind to become successful. So I had to, it was like, God blessed me with this brain. I had to create a mind.

• 1:52:11Speaker 01

  And so in doing so, I figured out every piece of shit human being in the world, cause that's what I was going off of for myself. So I know why you go on Instagram. I know why you, cause you just have the time. You have the time because you don't want to put that time into bettering oneself. So I know why I'm misunderstood. I'm misunderstood by people who have plenty of time on their hands to misunderstand me because they are exactly where I once was. Which is a low-life, lazy piece of shit. And it's the harsh reality of people who troll you, who go after you. They have nothing better to do with their lives.

• 1:52:56Speaker 01

  It's not some after-school special. It's the truth by once was that way. I know where it all comes from. That's why it's frustrating me now, cause I'm not so frustrated at the fact that I'm being trolled. I'm frustrated by the fact that you don't have the courage, the courage to try to be somebody better than which you're not. And that's the frustrating part.

• 1:53:19Andrew D. Huberman?

  It's interesting because earlier we were talking about relationships and you said in a very candid way and I really appreciate you sharing that that you make sure that the people close to you, your family, has everything they need.

• 1:53:31Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:53:32Andrew D. Huberman?

  And that they also understand that you're gonna take what you need to continue to build you.

• 1:53:35Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:53:36Andrew D. Huberman?

  Period.

• 1:53:36Speaker 01

  Period.

• 1:53:38Andrew D. Huberman?

  In some ways,

• 1:53:40Andrew D. Huberman?

  it seems you've also included the general public in that family. You're saying, listen, I'm gonna give you what you need, I'm gonna give you as much of myself as I can, except I'm gonna stop right at the line.

• 1:53:52Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:53:53Andrew D. Huberman?

  That if I were to cross it, is gonna prevent me from continuing to build myself and by the way, this relationship only exists because I don't cross that line.

• 1:54:03Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:54:04Andrew D. Huberman?

  And I think as much as there are detractors out there, people that try, right? I mean, it's pretty, whatever they're doing is pretty feeble in my mind. I mean, it's like cap gun fire, you know? If, if that.

• 1:54:16Speaker 01

  Very feeble.

• 1:54:17Andrew D. Huberman?

  You know, so many of us, men and women, old and young, hear something and feel something in your message. Like, yeah, like it seems kinda crazy, gosh, like, doesn't he ever just relax, you know, what about his sleep, you know? Look at his feet, he's gonna, he's gonna injure himself. I've heard, listen, I'll be very direct. I got friends who were in the teams who just go, yo, what's he gonna do when he can't run? And I know the answer is to keep running.

• 1:54:44Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:54:45Andrew D. Huberman?

  Right, but it's more comfortable for people. Even high achievers.

• 1:54:49Speaker 01

  Especially high achievers.

• 1:54:51Andrew D. Huberman?

  To believe that if you took one thing away, that it would all go away. It's absolutely clear that's not the case with you. I'm 100% convinced. I just know that because what we're talking about is this.

• 1:55:01Speaker 01

  How many times I haven't been able to run? Two heart surgeries, multiple knee surgeries, and after every knee surgery, they say, no, I can run again. And I'm fine with that. There's no running up here, bro.

• 1:55:14Speaker 01

  None. This was what it was all about. That's what they've lost. What if you can't run? Give a fuck?

• 1:55:21Speaker 01

  It was never about running. Why do you think I run? It's the worst thing. I, I hate doing it more than anything.

• 1:55:30Speaker 01

  Hence the willpower.

• 1:55:31Andrew D. Huberman?

  Right. Your anterior mid-Cingulate cortex would be, would start to regress if you loved running.

• 1:55:37Speaker 01

  Think about it. Every day I wake up, I don't just run a mile, two miles. It's the one thing I hate the most to do and I do it like I love it. Two hundred and fifty, sixty, seventy, three hundred mile runs at one time, no sleep. And every step, when I get to, think about this, I get to the fucking start line, cussing at Jennifer. Why the fuck am I here? I hate this shit.

• 1:56:08Speaker 01

  After seventy some hours of running, every fucking question I ever had is answered. Every question I had is answered. I cap success.

• 1:56:19Speaker 01

  I don't, people go, what do you mean you cap success?

• 1:56:24Speaker 01

  For me to be who I am.

• 1:56:29Speaker 01

  So when I go smoke jump, I smoke jump three to four months out of the year, sometimes five.

• 1:56:35Andrew D. Huberman?

  Could you, just for those that aren't educated about, just like give us a brief description of what smoke jumping entails?

• 1:56:42Speaker 01

  So basically, you, you jump into fires, not into them, but you jump by fires that people can't get to.

• 1:56:51Andrew D. Huberman?

  So out of planes and helicopters.

• 1:56:52Speaker 01

  Right, out of planes, parachute, it's all parachuting. So you parachute out of airplanes and then you fight the fire. You and sometimes four other guys, or maybe eight other guys, guys and gals. And you're putting this fire out. So I lose millions of dollars every summer to do this. It blows people's minds. Why the hell are you doing this?

• 1:57:12Andrew D. Huberman?

  And you're breathing soot.

• 1:57:14Speaker 01

  I'm breathing soot, knees are jacked up, hitting the ground, hurting, whatever. Talking to normal people, they'll never get it, so I don't even explain it to them.

• 1:57:24Speaker 01

  But this is why, this is why I call it cap success. I'm talking financial success. For me to continue having that willpower, the second

• 1:57:35Speaker 01

  I just become a speaking monkey and travel around and speaking gigs 12 months out of the year, put camps on, do this, put on lectures, get supplement lines and do this and write more books and shit. I've ruined

• 1:57:52Speaker 01

  the exact thing I worked on my entire life. And while I didn't know it until today, but something always told me, this is a very, very, very perishable skill, this, this willpower that you have, because I do have a willpower that I have never seen in anybody in my life. It is a haunting force that just keeps me going. And I know that that is my strength. If you have that, so that's worth every dime I've ever made in my life.

• 1:58:23Speaker 01

  Is the fact that I can look a man in the eye finally, and have a real conversation without going like this. Because I'm lying, or I'm a piece of shit, or I know, you know how a person, and so many people do this shit. They're talking to you

• 1:58:37Speaker 01

  on who they want to be. They're lying to you. And they walk away, I've done it so many times, you walk away like, God, man, why can't I just tell him the truth? Why the hell can I just tell him the truth? You know how good it feels for me now to look at you in your eye? And every man, a man I see, because women won't get this, women will not get this. Man to man, that man shit. When you look another man in the eye, and you know that everything you're fucking saying is real. And it comes from a real working place, something that you earned. It's the best feeling in the world.

• 1:59:13Andrew D. Huberman?

  You can say that actually happened. Like, I know with certainty what I'm saying actually happened.

• 1:59:17Speaker 01

  Actually happened. Who I am and who I say I am, I am. No more lies. No more skirting the truth. No more bullshit. And that is worth every dime I've ever made in my life. And I swear to God on that. Every dime I've ever made in my life, building who I've built. So I cap success, because I know that if I ever go 12 months out of the year, and they'll put several, every day I'm going at it, but several months out of the year, I go right back to ground zero.

• 1:59:53Speaker 01

  Which means I'm just fucking David Goggins. No Goggins, no carry boats, fucking logs bullshit. It's just pick up that fucking Pulaski and dig.

• 2:00:05Speaker 01

  Hey, get that fucking pump, walk down a mile, put it in the fucking water, mosquitoes beating. You're just David Goggins. You're nobody. Cause that's where my growth is. That's where my willpower comes from. And that's where it stays. That's why I talk to you now. And, and, and can I talk like this, dude? People don't talk with this kind of passion, cause it, it, it ain't there. It ain't there. They're, they're regurgitating some shit from 30 fucking years ago. I'm regurgitating shit from an hour ago. Hour ago. Come on, man. It's just be real. And I can't be on these podcasts, I can't talk to anybody without being real. I'll go away. I'll just go away. Cause I, I, I can't give you what I wanna give you.

• 2:00:52Andrew D. Huberman?

  You said perishable skill. I think that's another word, set of words I wanna highlight. Cause skill implies behavior. And when we were just talking a second ago about the deep, true, bedrock sense of confidence that comes from looking someone in the eye and telling somebody something that you absolutely know it's true because it happened. You're talking about actions, not talking about perceptions. You're not talking about what you believe happened, you know it happened. And there's something really concrete about actions. I mean, that's what's so interesting is we're talking about the mind, but actions are the manifestation of the mind. And I, and the stuff that just stays in here, people die with that. It doesn't go anywhere.

• 2:01:35Andrew D. Huberman?

  I, I, long ago, somebody said, you know, I forget what the context was, it was a neuroscientist. He said, you know, most emotions like. They're just emotions. They're just in there. Like, you don't have to do anything with them. And I think certain emotions, you want to do something with.

• 2:01:49Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:01:50Andrew D. Huberman?

  But I think people forget this. They feel miserable, like they're gonna dissolve into puddle of their own tears. No one ever died from an emotion.

• 2:01:56Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:01:56Andrew D. Huberman?

  But they feel like they overwhelm us as if it's a tidal wave that's gonna pull us under and drown us. It's so interesting to me because I think what people, listen, you have a gravitational pull. People can feel the energy. I think, yes, you're either completely badly or partially understood. There's only one guy on the planet that truly understands you. I think there's one woman, Jennifer, who probably understands you as much as anyone's going to. And then the rest of us are kinda grasping, trying to figure it out.

• 2:02:24Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:02:25Andrew D. Huberman?

  But you're saying go inward.

• 2:02:28Andrew D. Huberman?

  So first go inward, and then it's actions. Inward and actions. Now, the inward piece is something I'd like to just spend a little bit of time on. Because there are a couple of characters from history, people that were in concentration camps. Nelson Mandela, I mean, I'm not sure he had Instagram in there. I'm pretty sure he didn't.

• 2:02:45Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 2:02:45Andrew D. Huberman?

  And I don't think there was anyone coaching him on like, hey, you're gonna get out someday. And actually, you're gonna lead an entire country. I'm pretty sure that's not how it worked. He had to find it here. He had to find it between his ears.

• 2:02:57Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:02:58Andrew D. Huberman?

  And there are other examples, but that's an important one. So the process of going inward, does it, for you, and here I will ask for suggestions. Because I think people want, there are those of us who want to build this skill.

• 2:03:12Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:03:15Andrew D. Huberman?

  Wall yourself off, phone off.

• 2:03:17Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:03:17Andrew D. Huberman?

  For big portions of the day, perhaps.

• 2:03:22Andrew D. Huberman?

  Texting off, the requests, the this, the that. Anyone that knows you knows that. We've communicated a few texts, but most of it comes through a filter. She's great, she knows you, you know, and she knows how to protect your time.

• 2:03:36Speaker 01

  And that hurts people's feelings. People get mad about that.

• 2:03:38Andrew D. Huberman?

  Hey, God bless. God bless you, Jennifer, you know.

• 2:03:45Andrew D. Huberman?

  Cutting oneself off, when you're in there, you say it's just you.

• 2:03:53Andrew D. Huberman?

  And the voices that come up are not pleasant.

• 2:03:57Andrew D. Huberman?

  And then at some point, it converts to action. Okay. How much, what is the process of picking the action? That's the piece that I feel like we, there's like a, a, a bridge to build here. If you can, if you would.

• 2:04:12Speaker 01

  So the action be like, like, it's like what's next?

• 2:04:14Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah, so what, like, when you go, go to sleep at night, when that happens, you know what you're gonna do the next day? It's pre-planned?

• 2:04:22Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:04:22Andrew D. Huberman?

  Okay.

• 2:04:22Speaker 01

  Yes. It's, it's always the same thing.

• 2:04:24Andrew D. Huberman?

  You're not building it on the fly?

• 2:04:26Speaker 01

  No, nothing's on the fly. Nothing, so, how it works internally for me is I'm, I, I put it exactly how it is. I'm an artist.

• 2:04:37Speaker 01

  And every day I'm putting, I'm, I'm painting Mona Lisa.

• 2:04:41Speaker 01

  Every day. And, but it's a different one. It's not the same painting. So every day I wake up, even though I do the same thing, it takes a different way to get there. So every day in my mind, I'm going through my mind, I'm just like, and, a good painter will not just, paint. He needs to create. And you can't create with phones and everything going around you. So you gotta block yourself off. You only do two podcasts in a year. You block yourself off and you're, and you're painting this thing inside, and you're going through all these different colors of paint and everything else. And you can only figure out the right painting if you spend the correct amount of time in your brain. So every single day, I'm literally going with my mind and I'm painting.

• 2:05:26Speaker 01

  I'm creating this, this masterpiece. And the masterpiece is always myself. And, but to do that, you cannot have any distractions. Because if you're talking to an artist and he's trying to think about the next painting, he, he can't. So, it's impossible to listen to you and listen to what your mind and body are telling you we must do. People don't do enough of. They don't do any of it. You're, they don't have passion, they, they lack passion, drive, determination, because you haven't spent time with yourself. Your mind will tell you what is next. But you haven't spent the time to go, alright, let me just figure this out.

• 2:06:10Speaker 01

  You're looking for, "Let me Google this, and let me Google that, and let me..." You're not gonna find it there. Because there's billions of people in this world.

• 2:06:23Speaker 01

  And they're all supposed to be individuals.

• 2:06:27Speaker 01

  But we have a pack mentality. That's why you're so fucking lost. Why am I so unique?

• 2:06:35Speaker 01

  I'm being exactly what the fuck I'm supposed to be. I ain't follow shit. And when I did follow shit, I was like everybody else. The second I said, "Okay, man, hang on, dude. You don't like this, you don't like this, you don't like this." Who are you, David Goggins? Who are you supposed to be?

• 2:06:54Speaker 01

  Miraculously, all these things just... I couldn't even... The list of shit I had to do just wham! It's like, fuck, okay. Wow! Once you sit down with yourself and say, "Okay, I don't wanna be like Michael Jordan or Jim Brown, that both were on my birthday, so I looked at their birthdays, like, oh my, maybe I can be one of these..." I can't.

• 2:07:15Speaker 01

  I'm gonna be David fucking Goggins.

• 2:07:18Speaker 01

  And that looks like this. It just came. Everything flooded. So every single day of my life, there's a different thing that comes up that I have to do. But no one knows what to do because everybody else is following steps. Like the Republican and Democratic parties. I'm not political. Neither am I. At all, for this reason. Republicans are gonna vote Republican. Democrats are gonna vote Democrat.

• 2:07:49Speaker 01

  You're not even a human fucking being, bro. No way all you fuckers agree with all the same fucking shit.

• 2:07:56Speaker 01

  And I know I don't. So once you figure out yourself and who you are, all the answers come. So every night, a different painting is being painted. And it's a beautiful painting for myself, and I go, "Okay, that's it." It may look the same to most motherfuckers, but the end result is very fucking different. That's why my lounge... If you look at what I've done in 49 years, it's more than most people will ever do in their life because they were a race car driver. And that's what they did. They drove a fucking car. It's great.

• 2:08:32Speaker 01

  I was all kind of shit. Because that's exactly what the painting was saying to do. What the mind was saying to do. Was saying just drive a car so then that race car driver know what the fuck to do. He he retires from being a race car driver. And they're lost. People go, how how are you still? I don't get it. Dude, you're never gonna fill your list. But you never found your list. Because it never was presented in front of you because your head was cluttered with shit. Because you never just stopped for lots of minutes. Lots of years and just said, alright, it's me and you. Let it go. And it just bam, it's right there. It's right there.

• 2:09:15Andrew D. Huberman?

  I'm not a psychologist, as I mentioned before. But I'm gonna venture a hypothesis here. I think that you've mastered the process of internal dialogue. But when I say dialogue, I think most people think, oh, the the inner voice, the the chatter. But that's just one half of a dialogue. A dialogue is a two way street. So I completely agree. Because I know from experience that when we go inward, oftentimes we hear things if we're really honest with ourselves. It's like, I don't want to think about that or that, no. And then we start looking outward or we start trying to shift our attention or distract.

• 2:09:59Andrew D. Huberman?

  And there are a million reasons that are handed to us excuses and seemingly good justifications to be able to do that. But dialogue is a two way street. And it hit me while you were just saying what you were saying. I was paying very close attention and I realized David Goggins is talking about the voice that comes up, including the terrible stuff that no one wants to hear about themselves from themselves. But then he's also got the dialogue down where he knows the counter voice.

• 2:10:27Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 2:10:28Andrew D. Huberman?

  He goes, yeah, you're right. And so I'm gonna do this or maybe. No, remember this. You're in a dialogue, a two-way dialogue in there. Not a one-way chatter dialogue. There are books written by famous psychologists about chatter, trying to shift your internal narrative. You're like, bring the internal, the internal narrative, that's what going inward is about. But it's not one voice. Again, there's a hypothesis, I'm not claiming to be all-knowing. Lord knows I'm not all-knowing, okay? But you've mastered the dialogue, and if there are three voices, strong, medium, and weak in there, you're like, let's all come to the table.

• 2:11:06Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:11:06Andrew D. Huberman?

  So you've got a symphony of voices in there that are all you, that you know to be you.

• 2:11:11Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:11:11Andrew D. Huberman?

  And you know how to have those conversations. You're not afraid to be in those conversations. And then you know what the outcome of that committee decision is. And you put it into real-world action, and the world only sees the action.

• 2:11:24Speaker 01

  That's it.

• 2:11:25Andrew D. Huberman?

  And only you can know your internal dialogue. And only I can know my internal dialogue. And the only way to quote-unquote "know it", is to spend a hell of a lot of time there.

• 2:11:36Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 2:11:36Andrew D. Huberman?

  Okay.

• 2:11:37Speaker 01

  A lifetime.

• 2:11:38Andrew D. Huberman?

  Got it.

• 2:11:39Speaker 01

  A lifetime, like, think about it. For me to be sitting here in front of you, you're not gonna call 300-pound Ecolab guy to come sit here. You might, I don't know, maybe?

• 2:11:52Andrew D. Huberman?

  Probably not.

• 2:11:52Speaker 01

  Probably not. Think about this. What we teach people is kind, kindness to yourself. Do you think if I taught myself kindness, and I agree with it, God, so many people, so many people take me out of context, it's ridiculous. Take it however the fuck you want to take it. But now it's 300 pounds. What do you think that conversation would have got me if I spoke kindness to myself? I'll tell you where it gets me. Right back to 7-Eleven, another box of mini chocolate donuts and a chocolate milkshake. That's the one voice. That's the one voice that most of us have that you're talking about.

• 2:12:35Speaker 01

  If you're in a conversation in there, the other voice that you create that says, okay... How does this look? It looks very ugly. That kind of conversation for me went away a long time ago. Which is why the dialogue is now, which you see a lot of action. Because most people have inaction. Because there's one person talking. And that one person is always leading you down the same path. The path that makes you feel very comfortable and happy with yourself. The second you create the other voice, there's conflict. There's battles, there's wars. There's defeat.

• 2:13:17Speaker 01

  One thing I learned, I taught myself this, and people go, "I don't understand what you're saying." I'm gonna try to break it down real quick. I didn't teach myself victory first. I taught myself failure. I taught myself how to fail. And people go, "That's so depressing." Is it? When you're 300 pounds and you can't read and write, and you're fucked up, how many times you gonna fucking fail on that process? So if you don't know how to fail, there is no victory. I never talked about winning. Because I knew the path to winning was gonna be years of failing first. So I taught myself how to fail properly.

• 2:14:02Speaker 01

  No one teaches you how to fucking fail. But if you're going out for insurmountable fucking odds, that make absolutely no fucking sense. A black kid that can't swim, 300 pounds gonna be a Navy SEAL. Okay. You better teach yourself how to fail first. Because if you sit in failure for too long, you will never come out of it. So the first part of my success was learning how to fail properly.

• 2:14:35Speaker 01

  And then eventually, I started getting a few victories. But that's what people don't get. When you have buried yourself in such a deep fucking hole, you better first talk about the failures you're gonna have first. And that's when that other voice comes up. It tells you, we gotta do something. It also tells you, boy, I'm not gonna lie to you, Goggins. You're in for a fucking climb, bro. You're gonna get your ass handed to you, made fun of, the outside noise, the inside noise. Both voices are gonna be fucking telling you to go fuck yourself. You are in for hell, bro.

• 2:15:13Speaker 01

  I am. So I'm better than to fail.

• 2:15:16Andrew D. Huberman?

  So this is what you mean when you say that whatever anyone says, it's insignificant?

• 2:15:20Speaker 01

  Insignificant as fuck.

• 2:15:21Andrew D. Huberman?

  Right, it's the cap gun fire because it's just like it, because the voice in your own head is, is far worse. That, that, and I should say, sorry, one of the voices in your head.

• 2:15:31Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:15:31Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah, I'm, I'm being very like detailed, almost surgical about that because I think this thing about inner dialogue, we think is one voice.

• 2:15:37Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:15:37Andrew D. Huberman?

  But you're making it clear, it's many voices.

• 2:15:40Speaker 01

  It is. And the thing about it is, you, you, you have to be really, and sometimes all the voices are telling you the wrong shit, man. But through years, years, not a podcast, or listening to a book, or reading a book, years of sacrifice, of suffering, of diligent, pinpoint fucking work on what you wanna do for yourself. Not like, oh, let me just do a bunch of shit. Let me, I wanna be in every task possible. No. Pinpoint what I want to do with my life.

• 2:16:20Speaker 01

  What happens is, you have all these voices that are telling you, you're fucked up, and this could be hard. But for some reason, you put so much practice into you that you can ignore every one of them that are telling you, you're not gonna fucking make it. And still be able to fucking make it. Because you have put the practice in that you know, this is the process. It's such a daunting task that all the voices are saying no. But you still have the conviction that I know I can do this. And that's what it took for me to get here.

• 2:17:00Speaker 01

  Twenty, thirty years ago, I had this thirty-five, whatever it was, thirty to twenty-five years ago, pipe dream. And ever since then, every voice was like, "You're a fucking nut." But when you put that practice in, every day you lace them up, and I don't mean run, it's just a metaphor for life. When you lace them motherfuckers up every day, pretty soon you win. Pretty soon you'll fucking win. If you have the courage and the heart and the dedication and the mindset of, everybody can go fuck themselves. I know what I know. I've listened to myself enough to know I know what I know. None of you can hear what I'm hearing. And that's what people don't do enough of. They don't listen to their journey.

• 2:17:45Speaker 01

  They listen to everybody else's shit. Before you know it, I'm crazy. But if I'm so fucking crazy, why am I so successful? How'd that happen? I'm so misguided and fucked up and don't listen to him. Why am I the only one to do a whole bunch of shit? Why am I a trailblazer? Why? How is that possible? How can you be fucked up and also self-made the same fucking... No, no. Obviously, you're not looking at the truth in front of you. The truth in front of you is it sucks. It's painful. It's fucking mind-numbing.

• 2:18:29Speaker 01

  And that is the truth. And that's why a lot of people don't like listening to me. Because this is what it takes, creating another voice and sometimes going at it alone. All the time going at it alone, because no one's gonna believe in you. And that's that.

• 2:18:45Andrew D. Huberman?

  What I'm about to say is not conjecture, and I can say that with confidence, because I did a four-episode guest series with a brilliant psychiatrist, a guy named Paul Conti. Trenton, he's a Stanford-Harvard-trained guy. He's also got a lot of street in him. He's had his own hardship, real hardship. He's brilliant. And he said something that I'll never forget, which is, you know, we think that the forebrain, the part of our brain that creates strategy, etc., is the supercomputer. He said, "No, no, no, no, no."

• 2:19:16Andrew D. Huberman?

  It's like the supercomputer of the brain is the unconscious mind. It's the part of our mind that's controlling most everything. And most people unfortunately don't do the work to understand how their unconscious is controlling them. And that's a scary thing, this idea like your mind is controlling you, you know, and I'm not going to get into the free will debate. I believe in at least some will.

• 2:19:40Andrew D. Huberman?

  I believe what you're describing and this internal dialogue.

• 2:19:46Andrew D. Huberman?

  I think you have access to your unconscious mind. By listening to the dialogue going inward, we know this is true in sleep, in dreams, in meditation, and just by shutting out everything else, shutting out all the external noise, which is filled with things that pull us towards it. Noise makes it sound bad, but it's the gravitational pull of all the things that just allows to distract ourselves without knowing. That, you know, the ice cream, the have a cookie, the Merry Christmas. The unconscious mind, this huge piece of the iceberg underneath that Paul calls the supercomputer. He's saying that with knowledge as a neurobiologist, psychiatrist, psychologist, and he really knows. That's the piece that if one does real introspection, he calls it the cupboards.

• 2:20:29Andrew D. Huberman?

  You got to look in the cupboards and it's often really scary what you find in there. And most people are just like, I don't even want to know the cupboards are there. But you're pulling all the cupboard doors open.

• 2:20:39Andrew D. Huberman?

  And then you're, and I'm, you're extremely deliberate with what gets put into action. You're not just going, oh, like I'm pissed, so I'm gonna act pissed or I'm, you know, tired, so I'm gonna act tired. It's, you're picking very carefully what to do.

• 2:20:55Andrew D. Huberman?

  And that's a process that I'm guessing came to you, does it come to you as a, okay, it makes sense why running makes sense. It makes sense why smoke jumping makes sense.

• 2:21:07Andrew D. Huberman?

  So it seems like a huge

• 2:21:11Andrew D. Huberman?

  portion of your time is spent understanding yourself and making sense to you. And so when people don't understand you, it's gotta be extra frustrating.

• 2:21:21Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:21:21Andrew D. Huberman?

  Because most people don't understand themselves, so that we're all running around going like, you're this and you're that, because most people are just unwilling to look inward. And I'm including myself, by the way.

• 2:21:29Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:21:29Andrew D. Huberman?

  I mean, I've done a fair amount of introspection, but I'm inspired today. That word inspired, but it's true. Motivated

• 2:21:37Andrew D. Huberman?

  to start going inward further. Because it is scary. It's like, we don't know what's in those cupboards, and it's terrifying.

• 2:21:44Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:21:44Andrew D. Huberman?

  Especially because we don't know.

• 2:21:46Speaker 01

  And those are the first ones to open up. And like he talked about, you gotta go through those cupboards. I do spring clean every fucking day in those dark cupboards. Those dark cabinets are the ones I start with first. That's the real me, man. That's the real me. That's why I'm not ashamed. I don't hide. I used to hide. I don't hide anymore. He's exactly right. I don't know all the fucking science behind shit. I know what I know. That's why I don't listen to anybody anymore. I don't listen to shit. I think most people are full of shit. Because I know. I know the deep, dark secrets of those fucking cupboards. It's ugly, man. And every day I'm talking to them. Every day I'm cleaning them. I'm cleaning them and I'm talking to the same demons that came out of those fucking cupboards as I'm cleaning them.

• 2:22:31Speaker 01

  Sometimes I go right back in them again.

• 2:22:34Speaker 01

  It's not easy. And this is why most of us just why I am misunderstood. Because what comes out of those cabinets that I'm cleaning, sometimes they see on Instagram. Sometimes they'll see it in the pocket. Sometimes they see in this one. I turn people off. Open up your own cabinets.

• 2:22:57Speaker 01

  And then go talk about it. Let me see how pretty it looks. Let me see how pretty you sound. Let me see how put together your words are. I bet you a fuck or a motherfucker comes out because for you to go back in there again, to clean the same fucking cabinet that a demon came out of? Takes some big balls, bro. To do it every day of your life. To go back in there and spring clean every day. Not once a fucking year. Once every decade. Every day, you know, it gets dusty. And every day, you don't start with the victories. You don't go, oh, this is nice. Look at my, look at my, I love me, well, let me clean up this little dusty. Nope. I go right for the things that could keep me buried.

• 2:23:43Speaker 01

  And I go right there first because if I don't clean those out first, the day doesn't start.

• 2:23:49Speaker 01

  So what he's saying to me is truth. And like I told you many times today, I can never figure out how to explain this shit to people because I'm not neuro nothing. I'm just a guy that said, okay, we gotta start in the dungeon. And we gotta stay here for the rest of our lives. For you to become successful, the dungeon is a place that has to be clean. And it's the scariest place to be. That's why I'm misunderstood because I'm speaking from the dungeon. That's why I am successful. Because I go there every damn day. And that is the truth what he says. It's the exact truth.

• 2:24:33Speaker 01

  Those cabinets are fucking dusty, dirty, and scary as shit. Broken glass. Fucking dark. Spiders, cobwebs. But most of all, your biggest fears. The biggest things that put you in the fucked up place you are today are in there. That's why we all like to keep them shut. Even like to lock them up. Act like they never happened. That's why you never grow. You never improve. You never have real conversations like we're having right now. Never. Never. Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, let's not, no, no, no, let's not go there. I've talked to so many people who tell me that. Let's talk about this. Cause they'll tell me, but they can only say it once.

• 2:25:18Speaker 01

  And they'll say it in passing. They won't get deep in the weeds with it. Like you can't just clean it. Motherfucker, you gotta spit shine that motherfucker. You gotta relive it. Every fucking detail of it. You can't just be like, oh yeah, yeah, my dad beat me and they, you know, you know. It is what it is. It is what it is, motherfucker. It's killing you. It's taking over your whole fucking life. But that's the conversation. Yeah, my dad, I'm fine now though. I'm good. Okay. All right. No, you ain't. You ain't fine. You ain't fine. This is, this is real talk. People don't have that. So your boy's right. Hundred percent right. Scary as shit. It's scary as shit.

• 2:26:04Speaker 01

  But makes you who you're supposed to be. And that's the test. We forget, we, we think we're supposed to breathe air and have kids and pay the bills and shit.

• 2:26:17Speaker 01

  What, what's this life about? That ain't no sense. Being tested, my friend. Tests come when you have not studied.

• 2:26:29Speaker 01

  Tests come when you think that you're in a great place. That's, that's the test. The test is every day of your life. And most of us fail because we don't know why we're here. Cause we don't go inward to say, oh, you gave me a lot of shit to fix, man. And this test sucks. But then you start.

• 2:26:51Andrew D. Huberman?

  David Goggins.

• 2:26:54Andrew D. Huberman?

  I don't think I could add to that. I know I can't.

• 2:27:00Andrew D. Huberman?

  Thank you for sharing what you shared today. I mean. As much as your process, or anyone's process can't be completely understood from the outside, you gave us a real window into this thing, this process that you've was, as you said, God put it on you.

• 2:27:24Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:27:24Andrew D. Huberman?

  I believe in God too. People can believe what they want, but I, somehow your, your life, God gave you these challenges early on, and then there was a point where you went internal. And, like you said, you developed a skill, but it's a perishable skill.

• 2:27:42Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:27:43Andrew D. Huberman?

  And you clearly live in the process of opening those cupboards, reopening those cupboards, trying to spit shine those cupboards, understanding that they're never, ever really done, but that you can gain ground on them.

• 2:27:57Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:27:58Andrew D. Huberman?

  That you can win day after day after day. And you really shared a lot of concrete things that I think, I know people are going to be able to apply if they choose.

• 2:28:09Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:28:10Andrew D. Huberman?

  And I agree with you, I think most people will be like, whoa, that was a lot.

• 2:28:14Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:28:15Andrew D. Huberman?

  It's heavy. I think I wanna just kinda bake myself in Netflix and Chex Mix.

• 2:28:21Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:28:22Andrew D. Huberman?

  Instead. But there's also the reality that there are men and women, boys and girls, hear that and go, okay, and start cracking the, the cupboards open.

• 2:28:36Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:28:37Andrew D. Huberman?

  And I, I just know that, you know, for myself, I'm extremely grateful that you're willing to put it all out there. You're so brutally honest, so brutally authentic. That word authenticity gets thrown around so much. And I can tell you that for me and for everybody else, like that's what, really what resonates. So, whether or not you want to, whether or not it's the purpose behind it or not, You're lighting the path. So, thank you.

• 2:29:04Speaker 01

  Respect. Thank you. Thanks for having me.

• 2:29:06Andrew D. Huberman?

  Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with David Goggins. To learn more about David and to find links to his two fantastic books, Can't Hurt Me and Never Finished, please see the show note captions. If you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. That's a terrific zero cost way to support us. In addition, please subscribe to the podcast on both Spotify and Apple and on both Spotify and Apple, you can leave us up to a five star review. Please also check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode. That's the best way to support this podcast. If you have questions or comments about the Huberman Lab podcast, or if you have suggestions about guests or topics that you'd like me to cover, please put those in the comment section on YouTube. I do read all the comments.

• 2:29:49Andrew D. Huberman?

  Not on today's episode, but on many previous episodes of the Huberman Lab podcast, we discuss supplements. While supplements aren't necessary for everybody, many people derive tremendous benefit from them for things like improving sleep, for hormone support, and for focus. If you'd like to learn more about the supplements discussed on the Huberman Lab podcast, please go to Live Momentous, spelled O U S. So that's LiveMomentous.com/Huberman. If you're not already following me on social media, I am Huberman Lab on all social media platforms. So that's Instagram, Twitter, Threads, X, LinkedIn, and Facebook. And on all those platforms, I discuss science and science related tools, some of which overlaps with the content of the Huberman Lab podcast, but much of which is distinct from the content on the Huberman Lab podcast. So again, it's Huberman Lab on all social media platforms.

• 2:30:33Andrew D. Huberman?

  If you haven't already subscribed to our neural network newsletter, I encourage you to do so. It is completely zero cost and it provides podcast summaries and protocols in the form of brief PDFs of one to three pages, things like deliberate cold exposure, a protocol for foundational fitness, a protocol for deliberate heat exposure, for managing dopamine, for optimizing your sleep, and so on and so on. Again, completely zero cost. You simply go to hubermanlab.com, go to the menu, scroll down to newsletter and click on the newsletter tab, and you enter your email to sign up. But I should point out that we do not share your email with anybody. Thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion with the one and only David Goggins. And last, but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science.