50: With Tim Ferriss – Darkness & How to Stay on the Path, Last Days of Life & What to Do, Back-up Plans, Misconceptions

0:00:00 - Opening 0:03:57 - Tim Ferriss Introduction 0:09:50 - Some Practical Thoughts on Suicide" from Tim Ferriss's new book, "Tools of Titans" 1:15:08 - Tims additional thoughts on getting out of the Darkness 1:L16:41 - How to Stay on the Path and not get distracted. 1:30:31 - Always searching instead of enjoying what you have. 1:36:51 - Is there a Job that would NEVER be outsourced? 1:40:22 - What would Tim do if he were to die in 18 months? 1:44:21 - Helpful Relaxation Activities 1:50:54 - Work that is relaxing and therapeutic . 1:56:48 - Back Up Plans? 2:02:26 - Biggest misconceptions about Tim Ferriss 2:06:23 - Falling short in leadership. 2:19:34 - Entrepreneurship, the "cool" thing. Tims peeves. Posers, fakers, and being an entitles rookie. 2:32:11 - Cool Internet, Onnit, Amazon and Jocko Store stuff 2:36:57 - Extreme Ownership Muster 2 2:37:50 - Closing Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

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

• 0:00Jocko Willink?

  This is Jocko Podcast number 50 with Echo Charles and me Jocko Willink. Good evening Echo. Good evening.

• 0:14Jocko Willink?

  To be

• 0:17Jocko Willink?

  or not to be?

• 0:21Jocko Willink?

  That is probably the most famous

• 0:27Jocko Willink?

  of all of Shakespeare's lines and in fact it's so famous that it's often unfortunately

• 0:36Jocko Willink?

  used as a punchline, used as a joke.

• 0:41Jocko Willink?

  To be or not to be?

• 0:46Jocko Willink?

  It becomes easy to forget

• 0:50Jocko Willink?

  what Shakespeare is actually talking about.

• 0:56Jocko Willink?

  He's talking about death.

• 1:00Jocko Willink?

  And more specifically in this case, he's talking about suicide.

• 1:08Jocko Willink?

  And Prince Hamlet, the character that delivers that famous line, who's often called insane, but who himself says,

• 1:20Jocko Willink?

  "I am essentially not in madness, but mad in craft," meaning he is playing the role of insanity

• 1:32Jocko Willink?

  to further his own objectives. But not everybody even agrees on that point.

• 1:40Jocko Willink?

  But here's what Hamlet does say.

• 1:46Jocko Willink?

  "To be or not to be?" That

• 1:50Jocko Willink?

  is the question.

• 1:53Jocko Willink?

  "Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune?"

• 2:03Jocko Willink?

  In other words, he's talking about is it worth it to suffer through the problems we have in life? And he goes on, "Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing, end them."

• 2:23Jocko Willink?

  Meaning, should we, should we fight against the pain of life? This sea of troubles? And in that fight,

• 2:34Jocko Willink?

  should we choose death?

• 2:37Jocko Willink?

  Which is the only alternative to life?

• 2:43Jocko Willink?

  And he goes on, "To die, to sleep no more, and by a sleep to say we end the heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to."

• 3:04Jocko Willink?

  So he's saying that death lets you escape all these hardships of life and these thousand natural shocks.

• 3:17Jocko Willink?

  And he finishes it out, "Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished for, to die,

• 3:26Jocko Willink?

  to sleep."

• 3:30Jocko Willink?

  And he's saying that that is what we should wish for,

• 3:37Jocko Willink?

  to die.

• 3:41Jocko Willink?

  And that is this most famous of soliloquies is about killing yourself. It's about,

• 3:52Jocko Willink?

  it's about suicide.

• 3:56Jocko Willink?

  Now, we have a guest on today. And this is a guest who I've come to know since I sort of debuted in the world and in fact, this guest happens to be the person that actually debuted me to the world, that brought me into the world.

• 4:20Jocko Willink?

  His name is Tim Ferriss. And in September of 2015, he interviewed me on his podcast just prior to the release of my book Extreme Ownership. Now, at the time,

• 4:37Jocko Willink?

  I was certainly a Tim Ferriss listener. I'd read The Four Hour Work Week, I'd listened to a bunch of his podcasts, but I hadn't listened to all of them. And I think I had

• 4:50Jocko Willink?

  kind of the broad view

• 4:53Jocko Willink?

  that most people have of Tim. The human guinea pig, the investor, the author, just, you know, Mr. Smart, successful, healthy guy, who's out there enjoying the fruits of life.

• 5:12Jocko Willink?

  And with all that stuff in my mind, there I was in the first ever interview I had ever actually done with anybody ever. And it's a setup. The setup is, it's an interesting setup going into this for me, right? We're alone. I don't know Tim. I'm not the most open person in the first place. I don't know Tim. We meet two hours before. Now we're in his house, alone at a table, and the interview starts going kind of Jocko-ish pretty quickly, and I start going a little bit heavy on some stuff.

• 5:49Jocko Willink?

  And at one point, Tim asked me about books that I've read. And I brought up About Face. And then I brought up Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian. And I described how I liked that book because it captured the darkness, and not just the darkness of the world, but the dark nature of human beings in the world. And Tim, after I described that darkness, he said something along the lines of,

• 6:31Jocko Willink?

  "Hey Jocko, I struggle with this. How much should I voluntarily expose myself to darkness? Because I've had my own ups and downs that I contend with." And then he kind of took that question from there, and from that personal level, and he really quickly transferred it into something that was more about the world and about humanity in general. But the initial question that Tim started to ask, it wasn't about the world. And it wasn't about humanity in general.

• 7:13Jocko Willink?

  The question that Tim was asking was about Tim. And I didn't catch that during the interview. It went right over my head, but when I listened to the interview, I caught it. And I heard it. And I heard that beneath this guy that we all see, this happy-go-lucky exterior, kind of a solid image of mental and physical and spiritual strength, there was some darkness in there.

• 7:50Jocko Willink?

  And Tim and I were going back and forth a few weeks ago. And he said something to me, you know, I'm not sure if I'm aligned with the types of guests you normally have on your podcast. And thinking back instantly to that moment, I said, oh, no, Tim. You, you definitely are. Because you are a person. You're a human, and this is a podcast about human nature. And despite all the success you've had, you've had some challenges in your life. You've had some dark times, and you still do, and we all do.

• 8:35Jocko Willink?

  And people ask me about suicide. I mean, most of the time it's some indirect messaging or some messaging through Facebook, but people will, will ask me about suicide, whether they're having those thoughts. And I haven't really addressed it directly. Because even though it's, it's, suicide has definitely impacted my life directly in some awful and horrible ways that I'll never forget.

• 9:14Jocko Willink?

  But I don't have that same level of knowledge. So today, we do have that level of knowledge. And we're going to dive into it. So without further ado, Mr. Tim Ferriss, welcome to the show, and thank you for coming on. Thanks for having me on.

• 9:51Jocko Willink?

  Now, I don't even want to play around here. I want to get right in, I want to get this hard stuff done. I want to talk about this, this book that you just put out. It's called Tools of Titans. And in this book, and I just got done telling you this. You know, I looked and found the blog post that you had originally written. That's named a very Tim Ferriss name, in my opinion. It's some practical thoughts on suicide, right? Only Tim would think about practical thoughts on suicide. So, and you sent me the book, and I had found that blog post and I'd read it. But when you sent me the book, I saw that you had put it in the book. And I think that was awesome for you to do that.

• 10:34Jocko Willink?

  To put it in this book so that people have access to it. So, I want to get into this piece of it right now. From the book. And here we go. Some practical thoughts on suicide. In this chapter, I'm going to talk about suicide. And why I'm still on this planet. It might seem dark, but the objective is to give hope and tools to those who need them. It is a much larger number than you might imagine. I kept the following story secret from my family, girlfriends and closest friends for years. Recently, however, I had an experience that shook me, woke me up.

• 11:17Jocko Willink?

  And I decided that it was time to share everything. So, despite the shame I might feel, the fear that is making my palms sweat as I type this. Allow me to get started. Here we go. So you had some, you had some serious hesitation on putting this out there in the first place.

• 11:36Speaker 01

  I did. It sat in drafts for between six and nine months with fits and starts. Because I had a lot of doubt about my motivations for putting it out. The good that it might do, the bad that it could have indirectly. That I couldn't foresee unforeseen consequences. And just the embarrassment and also the fear of how my family would respond. There was a lot, there were a lot of factors that kept it in my drafts folder for a very long time.

• 12:08Jocko Willink?

  And then this story that you tell here is, is the story of what made you finally decide to, to talk about it in the public forum. And it, what happened was a guy came up to you and said, you were at an event, a guy comes up to you and says, hey, can you, can you sign this for my brother? It would mean a lot to him. And you, you know, you give him the, hey, no problem. You, you're kind of notice that there's something odd about the way the guy's acting, but you sign the book and a little while later, as you're leaving, he comes up and he says, you know, I gotta talk to you. And you say, hey, gotta leave, but what do you got? Let's go walk with me. And you find out that this guy's

• 12:52Jocko Willink?

  younger brother, who you had just signed the book for, had recently killed himself at the age of 22. And this guy told you, people listen to you, Tim. Have you ever thought about talking about these things about suicide or depression? You might be able to save someone. And then you say here in the book, I didn't know what to say. I also didn't have an excuse unbeknownst to him. I had every reason to talk about suicide. Some of my closest high school friends killed themselves. Some of my closest college friends

• 13:37Jocko Willink?

  killed themselves. And I almost killed myself. And you held that in for a long time. And there you were a public figure and you hadn't, you had never talked about this.

• 13:59Jocko Willink?

  Now, as I said, for me, I certainly have brushed up against suicide, starting with

• 14:09Jocko Willink?

  my best friend when I was a kid. A kid named Jeff. And I had joined the Navy. And I was in SEAL training and I got, we had kind of grown apart. And I talked about this when I was on your podcast, you know, I grew up with, in, in a rural area in New England. And there was a lot of hippies and just kids, you know, deadheads and whatnot. And I didn't go in that direction, but my really good friend did. And he ended up getting heavily involved in drugs and booze and everything else. And he got involved with a girl and when they broke up, he killed himself in a horrible way that I'm not even going to talk about.

• 14:51Jocko Willink?

  But I got word of it, I was going through SEAL training and I get word that this kid, you know, that I was such good friends with, killed himself.

• 15:04Jocko Willink?

  And then on top of that, now we go 1993.

• 15:10Jocko Willink?

  And again, one of my best friends in the SEAL teams. Absolute stud of an individual, of a human being, an incredible athlete, quarterback at the Naval Academy, by the way. Record holder at the Naval Academy, just a hilarious guy, leader of men.

• 15:34Jocko Willink?

  Just incredible human being. Named Alton Lee Grizzard.

• 15:40Jocko Willink?

  He got murdered. Along with a female naval officer named Carrie O'Neil. They got murdered, both of them, by another Navy officer who also went to Naval Academy, who then killed himself. So murder-suicide. And

• 16:02Jocko Willink?

  I'll tell you what, anybody that knew Griz, I mean, this was just devastating, devastating. This damn near broke my heart.

• 16:14Jocko Willink?

  And then most recently,

• 16:19Jocko Willink?

  in December of 2012,

• 16:22Jocko Willink?

  another SEAL that I knew.

• 16:27Jocko Willink?

  Who was the commander of the SEALs in Afghanistan? The commander of all the SEALs in Afghanistan.

• 16:36Jocko Willink?

  On deployment in Afghanistan.

• 16:40Jocko Willink?

  Goes to a meeting. Gets done with the meeting. Goes to his room. Shoots himself in the head. Kills himself. Ah, no, no suicide note. No strange behavior, no indicators, nothing.

• 16:56Jocko Willink?

  And like I said, this guy was in my sister platoon at SEAL Team Two. I mean, just a great guy. Respected SEAL.

• 17:06Jocko Willink?

  And boom. Gone.

• 17:12Jocko Willink?

  And I guess that's why I, I, I feel strongly about wanting to bring you on and, and talk to you about this. Cause I know you felt it. Personally, you're talking about it. And I, but personally, I actually have never wanted to kill myself before.

• 17:28Jocko Willink?

  Now, I, I will say there are times in my life where I, where I cared less about living than other times. And it certainly in combat, I definitely accepted that I could die and I was okay with it. And there's probably times in combat where I crossed the line a little bit towards the just straight bring it on. Let's do this. But I, I never seriously how had that. You know, that thought. But it's something I know is out there. Like I said, I've, it's brushed up against me. It's crushed me.

• 18:05Jocko Willink?

  And when you say in this book. That you almost killed yourself. And, and we'll talk about what got you there and, and how you ended up there. But. How real is that feeling when it hits you?

• 18:23Speaker 01

  There's nothing realer. I think that the the delusion or the set of delusions that you find yourself in seem as real as this table that we're sitting at, as real as anything you see or hear. And the voices in your head, that internal dialogue, the self-talk is a powerful thing. And it can be powerful in constructive ways and it can be powerful in extremely destructive ways. So for me, it felt permanent, it felt inescapable, it felt concrete. I felt like I had a column of evidence, exhibit A through Z, to indicate that I would be better off killing myself. So it wasn't a desire to, it wasn't a desire to end my own life.

• 19:05Speaker 01

  It was a, a desire to stop suffering and stop causing the suffering of others or what I perceive to be inflicting on my loved ones and family members and so on. And feeling trapped, I think above all, it's feeling trapped and feeling alone, like you are flawed. And in being flawed, you are unique and you should be just be sent back to the factory and that equals taking yourself out.

• 19:31Speaker 01

  Extremely real though. It's definitely, it was, it was as concrete as any emotion or any object or any interaction that you could imagine.

• 19:39Jocko Willink?

  And it's, it's gotta be weird now and again.

• 19:43Jocko Willink?

  And you say this, like you're looking back at this now and of course, this is so easy to see and go, you know, I was not thinking straight. And right now you can tell it's not real. Or those problems that you perceived, you could tell that they weren't real problems. They weren't unsolvable problems. They weren't worth ending your life over, but you get trapped in there.

• 20:07Speaker 01

  And I think in particular, you do get trapped. And in my case, there were say five or six different events that happened roughly at the same time that caused me to spiral. And as I spiraled, I got to a point where I felt like I would never contribute anything meaningful to other people or to the world because I was so handicapped by this pessimistic, dark view of the world and of myself. And I was like, well, if that's the case. Why go through all this pain to try to solve these various problems? When clearly, like you said, in retrospect, it's ludicrous. I mean, it's ridiculous, but at the time, it seemed anything but.

• 20:51Speaker 01

  Why not just Ctrl Alt Delete? Let's just shut this computer down.

• 20:59Jocko Willink?

  You know, I got, I got, I get to see this a little bit right now.

• 21:03Jocko Willink?

  You know, I got kids and you know, I got teenage daughters and little things in the world that they think are the most important, you know, things in the whole world. I mean, literally like a dress or a pair of shoes.

• 21:17Jocko Willink?

  It's okay, we can get you some more shoes or whatever. It's, you get to see a glimpse of what you're talking about, just with any human, any human anywhere that even in a workplace where someone's going through some problem at work and they didn't get the report turned in on time and, and they're acting like it's the end of the world. And it's actually the end of nothing. Actually, in many cases, means almost nothing.

• 21:43Jocko Willink?

  Almost nothing. I'm gonna go back to the book.

• 21:49Jocko Willink?

  So you say to Silas, which is the guy that, that had come up and asked you to, to sign the book, you come up and say, you, you say, look, I'm sorry for your loss. And then you had sort of the internal talk once again with yourself and you say, I'd failed his brother by being such a coward in my writing.

• 22:13Jocko Willink?

  How many others had I failed? These questions swam in my mind. And then you look at Silas and you say, I will write about this. I promise.

• 22:24Jocko Willink?

  That's probably when you made your first decision to get this draft going. Actually, you said, and with that, I got into the elevator and I added my own phrase on here and you should have had me edit this, but you said, and with that, I got in the elevator and I added, and headed down. Because the next part of this is called into the darkness and you've got a great quote in here that I'd never heard before.

• 22:53Jocko Willink?

  The quote is, "They tried to bury us. They didn't know we were seeds." And

• 23:04Jocko Willink?

  I think that's an awesome quote. They tried to bury us. They didn't know we were seeds. And I can tell you that I didn't bury these thoughts and these feelings. And I'm, I'm thinking back, I'm just trying to kind of deconstruct where, where my attitude came from and all the stuff. And I think that when I grew up, I listened to some things that may, that, that just pulled those seeds right out of the ground. Like they were plain as day. When you grow up, listen to the kind of music that I listened to, just dark, heavy music.

• 23:37Jocko Willink?

  That sang about this stuff. And I'll tell you, there's a, uh, uh, one of the best pieces of music that you can hear on this subject. And I don't even, it's dark. But Henry Rollins on an album called Lifetime, there's a, a song called Gun in Mouth Blues. And I saw him perform it many times live.

• 24:01Jocko Willink?

  And it, it like took me through those emotions. You go on YouTube and trying, it doesn't deliver the way it was when I was a kid, when I was 14 or 15 years old. And I got a guy on stage, a grown man to me at that time, who was, you know, 25 or something, whatever Rollins was at that time. And he's singing about that. And so for me, I'm thinking to myself, well, those seeds weren't buried for me. They were out. Right? I was thinking about that, but I wasn't, like, I was okay with me. You know what I'm saying? And I, uh, and a lot of the music that I listened to back then talked about that stuff. So I didn't bury those seeds ever, really.

• 24:42Jocko Willink?

  And I'm, what, is that something that you did? Obviously you put the quote in here. But how do you see yourself? How did you bury those seeds?

• 24:54Speaker 01

  So I included the quote for a few reasons. The first is.

• 25:01Speaker 01

  Effectively exactly what you alluded to. So these internal demons, these self doubts, these self criticisms, I felt were a huge weakness. And so to compete to whether that's in sports, academics, or otherwise, I kept that all in. So I, I actually grew up on the same music or similar music, but I was listening to Slayer. I was listening to a lot of dark music, which I can still appreciate the double bass and so on in Slayer album. But for me, because I never, I never chose to express any of that. I had no release valve. So it

• 25:40Speaker 01

  actually fed, I think, in a way, this type of self loathing. And it could have been biochemical in the first place. I don't know, quite frankly. And I mean, my family, at least on one side, has a history of extended depression and schizophrenia and so on. Schizophrenia less so. But so maybe it started there. Who knows? I don't know what the origin is. And so I included that quote as a reminder of two things. A, when you try to suffocate or bury or disregard these thoughts and emotions, as opposed to contend with them, or deal with them in some fashion, they are seeds. And you're pouring fertilizer on them when you try to neglect

• 26:22Speaker 01

  and avoid them. The second reason I put that in is to remind myself, if you feel like external con, if you, if you feel like external circumstances, or external actors, meaning people,

• 26:37Speaker 01

  are stacking the decks, deck against you, or trying to bury you, right? Trying to defeat you in some fashion, you are the seed. So you can recover from that. And there's strength to be found in the struggle. So I included it for both of those reasons.

• 26:53Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's, and I've talked about that before. This idea of battling demons, right? And one of the things I, I said on the podcast, on an earlier podcast is I just said, don't let the demons ambush you. Don't let them sneak around in there. You gotta bring them out. You gotta, you gotta bring them out and confront them and deal with them. Don't try and bury them. Bring them out. And so that's, that's very similar. And also, When you were a kid, this is, this is also interesting because you were an overachiever as a kid, right?

• 27:24Speaker 01

  I was good in school. I was very, very small. I got the shit kicked out of me routinely up until about sixth grade.

• 27:30Jocko Willink?

  But you wrestled, you were a good wrestler, right?

• 27:33Speaker 01

  I did, yeah. I got up to national level towards the end of high school. I did not wrestle in college since it was Title IX at Princeton where I ended up going. But I was a academically certainly a high achiever.

• 27:44Jocko Willink?

  And a good wrestler and a really good wrestler academically. I mean, you're going to Princeton, right? So that's pretty much.

• 27:51Speaker 01

  And then you landed Princeton and everybody.

• 27:53Jocko Willink?

  Kicking ass.

• 27:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, no, I, I, I had very supportive parents, did really well in school, got to Princeton and realized everyone was at that level or higher. And it's a different playing field.

• 28:06Jocko Willink?

  And, and is that one of the things you think that as you started thinking about this darkness, you're looking at these other people going, oh, they don't have that. I gotta bury it because they're all, they're all smart as me and great athletes. And so I'm competing with them. And I don't want to have that chalk against me of saying, oh, you know, I'm a little bit sad today. That's bad. I'm going to be positive.

• 28:27Speaker 01

  For sure. I think that was part of it. The, on one hand, I enjoy competing. So having a bunch of stronger competitors didn't bother me at all. I was actually pretty thrilled about it. But I did feel like to compete on this higher level playing field. It would not behoove me or help me to walk around bemoaning my weaknesses at all. So I didn't. And I felt like particularly being the, going to that school was a real stretch for my entire family and extended family. I felt like I had to deliver and

• 29:08Speaker 01

  there was no pressure from my parents whatsoever, but I don't need anyone else's pressure. I can deliver plenty of that for myself. And I felt that a lot was riding on that. And the plan, of course, as many people might have in their lives is get good grades in high school. Go to a good college, get great grades in college, get to a fantastic job and so on and so forth. So. Which led up to a lot of the catalyzing events later in college in senior year that that were really the the straws that broke the camel's back because I was I wasn't always near the precipice. I mean, I was healthy for long stretches of time, then I'd have maybe a depressive period, but it was manageable, oftentimes coincided with winter. I don't handle that type of weather very well, which is part of the reason that I now live on the

• 29:53Speaker 01

  West Coast. And

• 29:55Jocko Willink?

  Did you, did you, were you self aware of that?

• 29:59Speaker 01

  Very aware, very aware. At the time, probably less aware of the weather, having the impact that it did. But

• 30:05Jocko Willink?

  But you would literally say, oh, man, I'm feeling down right now. This is one of my secular things. It'll be okay.

• 30:12Speaker 01

  Definitely. And used

• 30:14Jocko Willink?

  That's pretty introspective for a kid.

• 30:16Speaker 01

  Well, I spent a lot of time in my own head and there are benefits that come from that. You can get very good at academics and then sometimes you're just your own worst enemy. So being trapped in my head is not always the carnival that you might think it to be. Sometimes it is for sure, depending on what I've eaten or imbibed as well. But that's a separate podcast. The, the, but I've learned to manage it. We're jumping a little bit ahead. But for instance, and we'll get to it, I'm sure, but the, the writing of senior thesis, that was a major trigger for a lot of reasons. Now, for instance, you know, writing the book that's sitting in front of us, I flew a researcher from Canada

• 31:01Speaker 01

  to be with me almost 24/7 while I was in the final six to eight weeks of writing this book. Why? Did I need him to come from Canada to be there in person? No, absolutely not. But I wanted another human around so I wouldn't go red rum, red rum.

• 31:18Jocko Willink?

  And Well, when you write 700 page books, my brother, you're gonna end up a lot more likely to end up in the red room than in the normal room. So you're right that we do start getting into this. Let's talk about this.

• 31:34Speaker 01

  But can I, can I, can I say one thing? One of the reasons, and you did give me a 20 to say this, so in fairness, but one of the reasons I recommend your podcast so much is because you talk about the darkness and you talk about how common it is. And I think the reason, for instance, out of the blue, one of my friends, super handsome guy, wealthy family, ladies throwing themselves at him in high school, kills himself out of the blue. No one expected it. And I think that when you find people in any circumstance who end up taking it to that point, it's because they think it is a rare flaw. They're the one in a thousand who happens to be so

• 32:18Speaker 01

  fucked up beyond repair that it's not worth continuing. And by exposing and discussing the darkness, you realize, I mean, that's 50% of the people or more 50% of the time. It is extremely common. No matter what you think your defect is, anger, depression, you have plenty of people to keep you company. So, in any case.

• 32:40Jocko Willink?

  It gets a little crowded up there.

• 32:41Speaker 01

  It gets crowded. So that's.

• 32:43Jocko Willink?

  That's a great point. Let's go into this then, when we go into what happened and some of the things that went down. This downward spiral is what you call it. And again, in here, I'm going back to the book, in hindsight, it's incredible how trivial some of it seems. And I put my note in there, next to that's like, because you're detached from it now. And that's such a key thing I talk about all the time, right? We want to remain detached from things. We don't want to get wrapped up in the emotions. We want to stay back. Because when you detach from it, every answer is so clear when you're not wrapped up in it. This is this stuff that happened to you. Sure, was it challenging? Yes. Did it suck?

• 33:26Jocko Willink?

  Was it hard? Yes, of course. But detached from it now, you're looking at it, you might literally be laughing at this stuff now.

• 33:33Speaker 01

  Oh, I do. I mean, I wrote it. And that's why at the end, there's this part.

• 33:39Speaker 01

  Towards the end, it's like many of you might be thinking, wait a second, a Princeton student got a really bad grade, boo fucking who, like, are you kidding me?

• 33:48Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 33:48Speaker 01

  But that's the whole point, right?

• 33:49Jocko Willink?

  That is the whole point, is that you don't, is that people, we don't detach, we get absorbed in this stuff and it becomes our world. So you get, I'm going back to the book, I include wording like impossible situation, which was reflective of my thinking at the time. And it begins, senior year, slated to graduate in June of 1999, somewhere in the next six months, all these things happen. First, you fail to make it to the final interviews for Mackenzie Consulting and at some other company, and you start losing confidence. So this is the first time you get kind of a little bit beat in your life, a little bit.

• 34:23Speaker 01

  For sure. I was doing extremely well academically and all of a sudden I didn't know what I was doing wrong. And just, just to provide a little bit of context, and it's, and like, this is like, I have this huge smirk on my face because it's so ridiculous, you know, in hindsight. But at Princeton, or any Ivy League school, really, there are only a handful of industries that recruit. Primarily, you find management consulting firms and investment banks. Why? Because they want to hire you and then use your pedigree, Princeton, so that they can charge their clients, in the case of management consulting, $500 an hour for photocopying, right?

• 35:04Speaker 01

  It's not at all as exotic as it might seem, but everyone is competing for those slots. And I didn't know what to do next, so I just decided, being very driven in that way, I'm going to compete for what everyone is going after, because I think I can beat them. Now, this is the first time that I really felt like, A, I got my ass handed to me, and B, this was important. If I lose a wrestling match, I know why I lost. Here, I didn't know what was wrong. So that unknown variable hit me reasonably hard.

• 35:33Jocko Willink?

  I can imagine that now you're doubting everything. In a wrestling match, you go, hey, my conditioning wasn't good, or hey, my takedowns weren't on point. And here, you're just going, what was wrong? I don't know what was wrong.

• 35:43Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 35:43Jocko Willink?

  Something's wrong with me.

• 35:44Speaker 01

  And no one could tell me. Even the people who interviewed me, they wouldn't give me the feedback. So that's, that's point A. Uh, very shortly thereafter, have a long-term girlfriend break up with me. Which again, in isolation, I think I could have weathered and I had weathered many times before, but I'm kind of reeling on my heels a little bit. And then my-

• 36:07Jocko Willink?

  Hold on, I'm gonna go to the book here because you give some pretty good specifics on that. She breaks up with you because, this is from the book, because I became insecure during that period, wanted more time with her and was massively disrupted to her varsity sports. But my point is that these things compounded, right? You get insecure and you think, why didn't they, why did they, why didn't they hire me? And then you look at your girl and you say, well, I'll go to her for comfort. Hey, but you know, I need more from you. And she's going, which all humans do, which is, oh, you're, you wanna throw yourself at me? I don't need you.

• 36:40Speaker 01

  Exactly. It was not only that, but, so she wakes up like you do, and I tend to go to bed when you do. And so I would wanna have these late night conversations and it, it screwed up her competition. I mean, and it was, it was extremely important to her, rightly so. She was a varsity athlete. So, exit stage left, girlfriend gone. And then the, the primary piece of this, sort of the, in my mind, the checkmate for a loss was the interactions that I had with my counselor or thesis advisor. And I was in the East Asian Studies Department. I started in psychology, then I moved from neuroscience to East Asian Studies to focus on language acquisition.

• 37:26Speaker 01

  And the, the senior thesis, just to put this in perspective, not every college university has a mandatory senior thesis. Princeton does, and it breaks a lot of kids. So I'm not unique in this, but I thought I was at the time. It breaks a lot of kids.

• 37:39Jocko Willink?

  When you say breaks, like they don't graduate because they don't finish it? Or they just get emotionally, they go through total turmoil and it, it-

• 37:45Speaker 01

  Both of the above and what I realized after the fact is a lot of kids kill themselves, actually. At many of these top schools, and I'm sure other schools, but it's, it's such a pressure cooker or the- perceive it that way. God, I feel old calling up kids, but regardless, it's such a pressure cooker. I got yours for you, Tim.

• 38:07Speaker 01

  It's very, very common. So it really does break a lot of kids, but it's generally, let's just call it, and it varies by department, but sixty to a hundred pages, sometimes longer. And it can count for twenty-five percent of your four-year, or let's just say cumulative departmental GPA. It is weighed very, very, very heavily. So even if you've had straight A's, it can really throw a wrench into the works. If you want to finish with a very strong GPA. Now, keep in mind, I had already been turned down for jobs. And this is, so they go together here. Lose my crutch that's keeping me up, which is the girlfriend.

• 38:48Speaker 01

  And then at that point, I am researching for my thesis. Everything's going fine so far. And I meet with the head of curriculum design for Berlitz International, which is near Princeton. Had a great dinner and he said, it's really too bad you're graduating in X number of months because we actually have a fantastic job for you that I could give you right now. You'd be a perfect fit. So I think to myself, well, this is going to solve a few different problems. I don't know what I want to do. I'm not getting picked up by these other companies. Why don't I take some time off and figure out the job and then figure out the thesis? Now, the thesis, I'm going a little bit out of order here, but the thesis was important because I had a meeting with my thesis advisor who

• 39:35Speaker 01

  had his own research agendas and, and as is very common in academics, professors will utilize the help of students at times to integrate things or research things for them. Slave labor. Slave labor. And he dropped a pile of, say, fifty, sixty pages of original Japanese research. So this is all in Japanese to integrate into my thesis. It wasn't a fit. It was, it was a round peg in a square hole. It would be nearly impossible to put into my thesis, but I decided, all right, well, he's the advisor. He's tenured.

• 40:06Speaker 01

  This is mandatory. It's not an optional.

• 40:10Speaker 01

  Then I figured out, oh my God, well, I could take this job, take a year off, do a great job on a thesis, come back, problem solved. So I have a meeting with my thesis advisor to tell him that I'm going to do this, not realizing at the time also that his, his research needs of me are time sensitive. And he lost it. He basically, he basically said, oh, you're just going to cop out and take all this time off of school? Well, better be the best thesis I've ever seen in my life. And not so subtly saying, I'm going to tank you. If this is what you're going to do, I'm going to, I'm going to tank you. And I don't think I was misreading that. And I was completely bewildered, then really upset, meaning sad, depressed, then really angry.

• 40:55Speaker 01

  And I was like, you know what? This is bullshit. Like this is Princeton University. Focus on the undergrad. This is, this should be a solvable problem. So I go to people in the administration. And I tell them what happened and collectively, the response was effectively, he wouldn't do that. Because once you have your immunity bracelet in the form of tenure, you're not getting voted off the island. And even people within the department would not pick a fight with him. Uh, or even really seek to clarify it. And that was when I felt totally hopeless. And that was kind of the beginning of the end as I saw it. At that point, it's very important to note, I was not suicidal.

• 41:37Speaker 01

  I just felt completely trapped and without options. I ended up regardless, taking the year off.

• 41:47Speaker 01

  And that is where things got particularly dark because I went from being surrounded by students, didn't have the girlfriend, but I was in a social environment to working for Berlitz. But what I didn't realize was going to be the.

• 42:02Speaker 01

  The setup, the logistics was working remotely. What does that mean? That means that I'm off campus now with two of my friends who go to work every day, normal hours, and I'm left in a bedroom or a living room alone to try to work on my thesis and to do work for Blitz, completely solo. That is where the carnival in my head is a very dangerous thing. I'm outmatched.

• 42:25Jocko Willink?

  Right.

• 42:26Speaker 01

  And we can, we can keep going.

• 42:30Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I mean, so the other thing that struck me as, once that happens, now you also start to see your friends.

• 42:39Speaker 01

  Graduate.

• 42:40Jocko Willink?

  Graduate, and they're all done.

• 42:43Speaker 01

  They're done, they're gone.

• 42:43Jocko Willink?

  And you've got the heavy burden still on you.

• 42:48Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that was, that, that was, seemed to be a huge piece of it as, as well. And then, I'm gonna go to the book, back to the book here. Your, your coping mechanism is to cover myself in sheets, minimize time awake, and hope for a miracle. No miracle arrives. One afternoon, as I'm wandering through a Barnes and Noble with no goal in particular, I chance upon a book about suicide. It's right there in front of me on a display table. Perhaps this is the miracle. I sit down and read the entire book, taking copious notes into

• 43:28Jocko Willink?

  a journal, including other books listed in the bibliography. For the first time in ages, I'm excited about research. In a sea of uncertainty and hopeless situations, I feel like I've found hope. The final solution.

• 43:51Jocko Willink?

  The idea just appears in a book.

• 43:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:56Jocko Willink?

  And you go full Tim Ferriss on this thing.

• 43:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, with the same enthusiasm and rigor and OCD that I tackle anything. I dove into that. And went to Firestone Library, great library at Princeton, to check out as many of those referenced books as possible to do my research. And one of them was not in, one of the key pieces. And so I made a request, put in a request to get notified. And I was living, I think it was in Lawrenceville, which is near Princeton at the time.

• 44:34Speaker 01

  And I think it's worth noting that I was past the point of deciding.

• 44:37Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 44:37Speaker 01

  I was in planning.

• 44:38Jocko Willink?

  You say that in the book and I'll just read it. It's important to mention that by this point, I was past deciding. The decision was obvious to me. I'd somehow failed, painted myself into this ridiculous corner, wasted a fortune on school that didn't care about me. So what would be the point of doing otherwise? To repeat these types of mistakes forever? To be a hopeless burden to myself and my family and my friends? Fuck that. The world was better off without a loser who couldn't figure out this basic shit. What would I ever contribute? Nothing. So the decision was made and I was in full on planning mode.

• 45:19Jocko Willink?

  In this case, I'm dangerously good at planning. I have four to six scenarios, all spaced out, start to finish, or sorry, specked out, start to finish, including potential collaborators and covers when needed.

• 45:35Jocko Willink?

  So as you just said, as you just pointed out, you were full on Tim Ferriss, research complete, decision made, going forward, figure out the best way to execute this and make it happen.

• 45:47Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, I remember. And actually, something that's not in there, I recall. I recall when I had the plans and then it was a matter of scheduling. And I was waiting for that last book to see if I missed any research before proceeding. But I had driven to Firestone, taken out these books and was very lethargic. I remember, I mean, this coincides with this type of deep depression, just very tired all the time. And laid down in my van, my, my used minivan handed me down for my mom. After going to Firestone and just slept for like three or four hours and woke up and I was like, okay. Let's just get this done. Let's figure it out and put it on the calendar.

• 46:32Speaker 01

  And the, what prevented that, it was pure luck. I had forgotten that instead of using my Lawrenceville address, I hadn't changed my address with the registrar. So my mail was going back to my home address where my parents lived on Long Island. And so my mom gets this postcard in the mail. I mean, thank God this didn't happen. A few years ago, it would have been via email. She wouldn't have seen it. And it said, in effect, uh, good news. The book on suicide that you reserved is now available at Firestone Library for pickup. So I got a very nervous call from my mom, which I did not expect to interrupt plans. Did you, did you think your mom, did your mom sense it?

• 47:17Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, I could tell. I mean, her, her voice was, was very shaky. And I quickly tap danced and talked my way out of it. And I said, oh, no, no, it's a friend at Rutgers. He couldn't get it at his library. So I reserved it at Firestone. But it, it shocked me out of my self-imposed false reality. And it was, it sounds so odd to say, but it was the first time that I realized my suicide would affect. No matter how cleverly I laid it out, it would ruin the lives of people around me. Because I thought, well, let me figure out a scenario where I can make it look like a complete accident. It won't look like suicide. It'll just look like an accidental death.

• 48:00Speaker 01

  I mean, I really, I really figured it out and.

• 48:05Speaker 01

  It didn't matter. It didn't matter. I realized after that phone call that.

• 48:10Jocko Willink?

  Did your mom confront you with it?

• 48:13Speaker 01

  She asked me about it and I was very fast to come up with the Rutgers lie.

• 48:18Jocko Willink?

  Did she say like, hey, Tim, are you okay?

• 48:20Speaker 01

  She did. She did. She did. And we love, you know, we, we love you, right? And it, it, it wasn't a 30 second conversation. It was a longer conversation. And there were follow up phone calls.

• 48:30Jocko Willink?

  Props to mom for picking up on that.

• 48:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. So that was, uh, dodging a bullet metaphorically by a millimeter.

• 48:40Jocko Willink?

  I'm going to go into this here. It's sort of you, you get through that. You, you kind of get through what you just said. You realize that this wasn't just about you. This was going to hurt everybody. You get through that and then you say, the very next week, I decided to take the rest of my year off, truly off to hell with the thesis and focus on physical and mental health.

• 49:02Jocko Willink?

  That's how the entire sumo story of the 1999 Chinese kickboxing Sansu Championships came to be. If you read the four hour work week, so you, you go on a full on year off, just complete. Now, my question for you on that

• 49:17Jocko Willink?

  is what about normal people, right? Normal people that can take a full on year off. They got to find another way to get their focus off the, what's going on in their brain at the work and get out of that carnival and focus on their mental and physical health while they're working their job, taking care of their kids, doing whatever it is they have to do.

• 49:39Speaker 01

  For sure.

• 49:40Jocko Willink?

  How's a normal person pull that off?

• 49:43Speaker 01

  Well, there are, I think, a few strategies and tactics that I have used and continue to use. So it's critical that people understand it's not like I summited the mountain, slayed the dragon and I'm done. This is, this is, uh, this is a movie that tends to like Groundhog Day, repeat itself, not necessarily that intensely. But if you are predisposed to periods of darkness, as many people are, you need to develop coping strategies. And it's not so much the year off, it was a focus on other things that helped. And there are a few, I mean, looking back on it now, I have a better toolkit.

• 50:28Speaker 01

  The first is, people talk about mind over matter, mind over body, mind over body, this type of stuff. I think body over mind is extremely underrated. So if you can't get out of your head, get into your body. Number one, that is the number one. Get out and move. And really, things didn't change for me dramatically until I started, oddly enough, getting punched in the head, going to the toughest boxing gym I have ever seen in Trenton, New Jersey, where I was the only guy not on work release.

• 50:56Speaker 01

  So I don't recommend that therapy for everyone. But, you know, one broken nose, a lot of bloody sparring sessions later, I was feeling more like my old self. So if you can't get out of your mind, get into your body, I think is very important. There are a lot of good biochemical reasons for this.

• 51:12Jocko Willink?

  I'll back that up too. And Tim Kennedy, who's a MMA fighter.

• 51:16Speaker 01

  Amazing.

• 51:17Jocko Willink?

  Just an awesome guy. He posted something on Instagram of a month ago or something like that, and Facebook and whatever. And basically, he was saying, he's addressing PTSD and that sort of darkness, right? And he basically said, look, guys, get out. Go work out, go push yourself. And it's very similar to what I tell people, like, hey, man, you know, do jiu-jitsu, lift weights, sprint, surf. Go get outside, get into your body. So I think that's universally, I universally agree with that statement.

• 51:49Speaker 01

  So let me lay out a couple of super concrete recommendations. And I should say in advance, I'm not a doctor, I don't play one on the internet. So you may need, certainly, there are many people who need medical interventions, whether it's pharmaceutical or otherwise.

• 52:08Speaker 01

  In my case, a few things that very much help with or without other adjuncts. Cold therapy, so cold exposure, and this has been studied, very, very effective as a supplemental or singular therapy for antidepressive purposes. It's very, very effective. So I routinely, and when I'm home in San Francisco, for instance, even on Long Island in the winter, I take short cold showers, pure cold showers. And Van Gogh, for instance, when he lopped off his ear and was put into treatment, he had two ice baths every day. That was one of the treatment protocols, and it's been looked at quite closely in the last few years. So cold exposure, one. So even if you don't get outside of the house, that's an option.

• 52:53Speaker 01

  You're gonna take showers, hopefully, anyway. Then you have, if you can afford it, I think a good test to have performed is comprehensive blood work. Look at micronutrient deficiencies in particular. So you could have, this is very common with depleted ground soil, selenium deficiency, zinc deficiency, copper deficiencies. These affect hormone production and much more, and can be fixed relatively easily once you identify them. I have friends, for instance, one was deficient in selenium, was going through depressive period, and he started eating Brazil nuts, very high in selenium content, and he called

• 53:38Speaker 01

  me a week later and said, "I feel like I'm on cocaine." Now, that's a dramatic example, and no, you shouldn't use cocaine to fix your depression, but blood work, I think, is, if you get your car checked more often than you get your body checked, you need to rearrange your priorities. Stoicism would be the next one. I find Seneca in particular, Moral Letters to Lucilius, Marcus Aurelius. People tend, if they read both, to either be full-on Marcus Aurelius guys or full-on Seneca guys, and there's not a whole lot of overlap. I tend to read Seneca, but I will listen to, say, one of the letters, Letters of Lucilius, every few days.

• 54:22Speaker 01

  And if I'm going through a tough period, I will listen to a 15-minute letter every day in the morning as I walk to, say, get a cup of coffee. And what Stoicism helps to teach you at its core, I think, or what it represents, is an operating system for...

• 54:37Speaker 01

  Being non-reactive in high-stress situations.

• 54:43Speaker 01

  And high-stress is relative. High-stress could be going to the DMV and waiting in line for some people. But stoicism is also not just something you read, it's a practice. So there's fear setting and fear rehearsal is very important. So the practicing the worst case is something that I'll do regularly. For instance, taking a few days of every month to fast, I do that. Taking a few days every month or every quarter to sleep on your kitchen floor in a sleeping bag and eat oatmeal for a few days. And realize, even if I have to quit my job, even if I get fired from my job, because a lot of concerns for many people are financial, I'll be fine. Things are fine. Things are manageable.

• 55:23Speaker 01

  So I spend a lot of time defining the worst-case scenarios, not just being vaguely afraid of bad things happening, and practicing them so that I build up some level of immunity, not immunity, but it's an inoculation. It's like getting a flu shot.

• 55:39Jocko Willink?

  Stress inoculation is what we did in SEAL Teams to each other. You go through hard training, you put all kinds of combat stress. And that way when you get in these scenarios in real life, you're kind of used to it.

• 55:48Speaker 01

  Well, exactly. And did one of my other favorite quotes, and I'm probably not going to get the pronunciation right on this name, but Archilocus, I think it is, says, "We do not rise to the level of our hopes, we fall to the level of our training." And that applies to a lot more than military. It applies to everything. So those are a few recommendations. I do think I'd be remiss if I didn't mention some type of meditation or mindfulness practice, which can take dozens of forms. It can take the form of exercise, anything with a repetitive motion, or anything, quite frankly, that forces you to be present, stay aware. If you're performing Olympic lifting, I guarantee you're not thinking about your to-do list.

• 56:29Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 56:30Speaker 01

  Or the argument that you had with a coworker.

• 56:31Jocko Willink?

  That's, you know, I think it was when I was doing a follow-up for the first Podcast that I did with you and somebody asked me about meditation and I was like, no, I don't meditate. I guess what I do do surf, jujitsu, weight lift, all this other stuff. So that kind of falls into again, I don't know. Cause I you, you know, you say, do you meditate? My answer is no, I don't meditate. You don't see me sitting in a corner with my legs crossed Indian style chanting, right? I don't do that. Do I get those benefits that people talk about? Do I feel them when I'm on the jujitsu mat? Or when I'm Olympic weightlifting, or when I'm doing whatever these physical activities I do? I guess I do. I guess that's where it is. And I think my word that I go back to all the time is being able to detach.

• 57:14Jocko Willink?

  I already said it once a day is, is being able to detach from these situations, detach from these, these stresses that are there. And, and actually going back to the book here, you say, I return to Princeton, turn in my now finished thesis to my still sour advisor. Get chewed up in my thesis defense and I don't give a fuck.

• 57:36Jocko Willink?

  And I, I, I think that is a very powerful tool. That is a very powerful tool and it's got me through all kinds of things. And I'll tell you specifically like, oh, things are going bad at work, fire me. Go, go ahead. What you, you, you want to fire me? Do it. Bring it on. I'll, I'll find another job. I'll go do something else. You know, e- even in the SEAL teams, you know, in, in my book, I talked about this horrible situation that happened with a fratricide. And that was the beginning of deployment. Well, as things continued on deployment, more, it's not like the bad thing stopped there. Other bad things are going to happen. And what I knew was that I was doing the best job I possibly could do. And if you guys above me in the chain of command want to come and fire me?

• 58:17Jocko Willink?

  Bring it. And it wasn't that I actually didn't care, but I kind of told myself I didn't care. And when you, when you release yourself of that stress of caring, you can actually perform better. You perform better when you say, you know what? And we talk about with fighters all the time, fighters will be in an event and maybe they have a hard match and they barely get through. And then they go, you know what? Screw this. I'm, I don't even care if I win or lose. They go out there and have the performance of a lifetime because they relieve themselves of that stress. So sometimes not caring is one of the best antidotes for do performing better. But it's very contradictory because you're saying, okay, I gotta perform really well. So what do I do? I'm not going to care, but I want to perform well. But you've got to, and I, I used to say this with guys. Would deal with girls, right?

• 59:01Jocko Willink?

  In the SEAL teams, you got guys, they're going through, you know, they're, they're young guys, right? They're 20 years old, 22 years old. And so they get these relationship problems and sometimes you gotta help them through that. And one of the things I'd say, I'd say, listen, I'd say, listen, buddy, they would be sad because they, whatever. And I'd say, listen, man, you gotta not care. And then I'd say, you can't just act like you don't care. You have to actually not care. That's what you actually have to, you have to actually not care. And if you do that, you're good. And you can walk away. And somebody asked me that the other day on Twitter. How do you get over a, how do you get over someone that you love that doesn't want you anymore? And I was like, wish them luck, walk away, don't look back. Don't look back, you've gotta not care.

• 59:45Jocko Willink?

  And I think when you said, when you wrote that in the book right there, I think it's a powerful thing.

• 59:49Speaker 01

  It, it is, and I wanna look at the ingredients that led to that, or at least one of them. Uh, so a key component in that entire story is after deciding, after having the mom intervention, after deciding to focus on other things, getting the thesis done, but not staring at pages on the floor in my house by myself 12 hours a day. I, I was offered an opportunity, it was half joking, but from a friend of mine I'd wrestled with, who is going to be competing in the San Show Nationals, Chinese Kickboxing. So that became a focus, that became a clear goal where I knew input in, output out,

• 1:00:30Speaker 01

  you know, garbage in, garbage out, good training in, probably good results out. Maybe I get knocked out, but there's always that chance. And the reason this is important, you don't need to have a large athletic event. What, what I've realized I accidentally did then, and now I always do, is much like, and I think you're saying don't care, another way that maybe you could phrase it is not being preoccupied by it, right? And if you're an investor, let's just say you're not a full-time investor. How do you create that peace of mind? You diversify your portfolio, so you don't have all your eggs in one basket. You can do that in life in a number of ways. One of them is diversifying your identity.

• 1:01:13Speaker 01

  So the way that I had set myself up for failure is all of my worth was set up in whether this thesis would be a success or not. And there were factors outside of my control that could affect that. What I try to do now, and I recommend this to startup founders all the time. I'm like, look, if your startup is the way you measure your entire worth as a human being, there are factors outside of your control that could tank it, macroeconomic or otherwise, competitive, etc. You can't have it dictated by how well your company is doing that day. So, for instance, why don't I show you how to do a very simple deadlifting protocol? And therefore, as a result, even if your company is having the most difficult quarter imaginable, if you're putting 10 pounds on your deadlift-

• 1:01:55Jocko Willink?

  10 pounds on my max, man!

• 1:01:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. That's a winning week. And so I try to have at least three primary goals, which would seem to distract me. Maybe for someone who isn't predisposed to depression and darkness, you can have one singular goal. For me, having, say, three, provides me with that identity diversification.

• 1:02:20Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and also, it sounds like you're not going to pick goals that are counterproductive. I mean, you can run a good company and still increase your deadlift-

• 1:02:28Speaker 01

  100%.

• 1:02:29Jocko Willink?

  And work on your breath hold, and none of those things are gonna-

• 1:02:31Speaker 01

  They're all complementary.

• 1:02:32Jocko Willink?

  They're all gonna help.

• 1:02:33Speaker 01

  Exactly. They're all complementary. And I should also say, this is going back to the meditation piece. So meditation is a terrible word. I mean, it needs a complete brand overhaul. It's just ludicrous. It carries a lot of baggage with it. Another option for getting your monkey mind out of your head so that you can function properly is to, and we had a funny exchange on Twitter about this, but is to journal in the morning. And really, you can look at morning pages, I won't get into it now, but a stream of consciousness writing for three pages will very often show you how stupidly trivial your concerns are. It makes it concrete. When you try to write it out, and you're like, wait, that doesn't make any sense.

• 1:03:12Jocko Willink?

  I'm gonna take that one step further. You want to know what it actually does? Well, in my mind, what it actually does when I'm writing something? Because I now write for my own podcast, right? When you write, you are forced to detach from what you're writing.

• 1:03:25Speaker 01

  100%.

• 1:03:25Jocko Willink?

  You are forced to detach from it. So when I'm writing something, you're looking at it. It's not in you anymore. It's out there. So that is a good way to detach, is by writing something down. That's another thing that happens when you do pros and cons list, right? Oh, I don't know what decision I'm gonna make, I'm gonna do pros and cons. Well, all you're doing is physically- Detaching, physically pulling those things, those ideas out of your brain, putting them on a paper, and now you're detached from them and you can make a good decision. I hate when I agree with you, Mr. Tim Ferriss.

• 1:03:53Speaker 01

  It makes the internet so much less fun when we agree. But a few other recommendations. One would be, and this is something that I've used as a coping mechanism often. If you can't make yourself happy, and happiness as a word is really problematic, I think. And chasing it tends to mean you're not going to catch it, by the way. But if you are in a low state or a depressive state and you can't figure out how to make yourself happy, just try to make other people happy. And it seems cliched kumbaya, but it's like, look, something as simple, and this is something that I do, as paying for the coffee for the person behind you in line at Starbucks,

• 1:04:36Speaker 01

  can actually have a significant impact on the well-being that you experience in a day. Something tiny like that. Or like, sometimes I'll just walk in, I'll be like, alright, it's a Friday, there's six people in this coffee shop. Alright, round of coffee on me. Like, it's such a simple thing to do, but cheapest therapy you will ever have.

• 1:04:53Jocko Willink?

  You wanna know what I do?

• 1:04:54Speaker 01

  What's that?

• 1:04:54Jocko Willink?

  It's kinda similar to that, but it's a little bit different.

• 1:04:58Jocko Willink?

  When I interact with some, let's say, I'm not a coffee drinker, but let's say I'm in a restaurant, but, you know, a 7-Eleven, right? A 7-Eleven, I'm going in there, I gotta pick up whatever, a bottle of water. When I interact with the person that's selling me a bottle of water at 7-Eleven, who's making $8.25 an hour, I treat that person like a human being.

• 1:05:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:19Jocko Willink?

  I treat that person like a human being. I say, "Hey, how's it going?" "Yeah, just this bottle of water, Thursday's hot out there, isn't it?" "Hey, I hope you have a good day." I just do that, cuz I always see people in the world that treat those other people like they're not people. And I think that just dehumanizes you as an individual. So, somebody that's cleaning toilets and is coming out of the thing with the bag of garbage and whatever, and they, "Hey, man, how's it going? Everything cool?" You know? "Hey, thanks." Something like that. I think those are important. And I definitely, the way you put it in the book is, if you can't seem to make yourself happy, do little things to make other people happy.

• 1:06:02Jocko Willink?

  Very effective magic trick, focus on others instead of yourself.

• 1:06:08Jocko Willink?

  Totally agree with that one. Going to the gym, the other ones you put in here is go into the gym, move for at least 30 minutes. I tell this, this is like the solution to everything, right?

• 1:06:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:17Jocko Willink?

  Oh, you got problems in your life? Cool, go to the gym. Cool, go get a workout on the next, next, let's, let's at least start there. I think those are, those are super powerful.

• 1:06:26Speaker 01

  And to give some specific recommendations that if you're not particularly prone to working out by yourself, a couple of recommendations, this is gonna sound funny, but any kind of partner or group exercise, and you can take your pick. I think rock climbing is fantastic. Any kind of ballet system, for instance. Any type of dance. I have to recommend dance on the Jocko podcast.

• 1:06:53Jocko Willink?

  Echo, edit that out.

• 1:06:55Speaker 01

  Acro yoga, even better. I'm gonna keep going here.

• 1:06:57Jocko Willink?

  Okay, we're going in a, we're going in the black hole here.

• 1:07:01Speaker 01

  Or it could be Thai boxing, right? Somebody with pads, interact with a fucking human being.

• 1:07:05Jocko Willink?

  We like to say jujitsu around here.

• 1:07:08Speaker 01

  Jujitsu. I'm just, you just involved with jujitsu enough to get choked out on a regular basis.

• 1:07:14Jocko Willink?

  No, you actually, you got a great list in here of practical gremlin defenses, what you call it. You know, you talk about, and these are all, all in the book that you put out. All these little tricks, they're not necessarily to combat depression. They're just things for people to maybe do better in their lives. Morning rituals, you got productivity tricks, you got, how do you face things that you're afraid of? You got the jar of awesome, you got gymnastics, you got acro yoga, but I'm not gonna talk about that one. But my point is, you got a bunch of these things written about in the book, which I think is, is, is very helpful to people. Hey, I, I gotta put this out there too, just because people are listening to this. If you're in that zone,

• 1:07:59Jocko Willink?

  1-800-273-8255, suicide prevention line. If you're there, give it a call. 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

• 1:08:12Jocko Willink?

  Get yourself help. Get through it, brother.

• 1:08:14Speaker 01

  And if you're prone to those cycles, also, one of my very close friends, who, by the way, extremely successful CEO. So material professional success does not make you immune to this necessarily. And that should be reinforcing and reassuring for people. Meaning to say, the people you see on magazine covers, they might very well be fighting the same battle that you are, something very, very similar. And what this friend of mine did, extremely successful, I mean, top 1% by any measurement. And he got close to the edge a number of times. And he realized he didn't care about himself, but he cared about his promises that he made.

• 1:08:58Speaker 01

  So he made a non-suicide pact with his brother, because he knew that he would never break his word to his brother, even when he didn't care about himself at all.

• 1:09:08Speaker 01

  Which is another effective approach.

• 1:09:09Jocko Willink?

  I believe that. I know plenty of guys, at least in my old job, we definitely all cared more about our friends, our brothers in the SEAL teams, than we did about ourselves, without question. So that would be a powerful thing there as well. I'm gonna, I'm gonna take it to your little section here where you wrap this, this section up of the book. Back to the book. My perfect storm was nothing permanent. But of course, it's far from the last storm I'll face. There will be many more. The key is building fires where you can. Warm yourself up as you wait for the tempest to pass. These fires, the routines, habits, relationships,

• 1:09:53Jocko Willink?

  and coping mechanisms you build help you to look at the rain and see fertilizer instead of a flood.

• 1:10:04Jocko Willink?

  If you want the luscious green of life, and you do,

• 1:10:10Jocko Willink?

  the gray part

• 1:10:13Jocko Willink?

  is part of the natural cycle. You are not flawed. You are human. You have gifts to share with the world. And when the darkness comes, when you are fighting the demons, just remember.

• 1:10:33Jocko Willink?

  I'm right there fighting with you. You are not alone. There is a large tribe around you and thousands of them are reading this book right now.

• 1:10:45Jocko Willink?

  The gems I've found were forged in the struggle.

• 1:10:52Jocko Willink?

  Never, ever, give up.

• 1:10:58Jocko Willink?

  Much love to you and yours.

• 1:11:02Jocko Willink?

  Tim.

• 1:11:11Jocko Willink?

  Well.

• 1:11:15Jocko Willink?

  It would appear that once again, the podcast went into the darkness a little bit. And I think that's okay.

• 1:11:25Jocko Willink?

  And again, I think that having you on here, Tim, someone that certainly like you just talked about comes across as outwardly happy and successful and loving life. And having you talk about these things and having you put them in the book is a real service to people. I think it's the most important thing I've ever written. Period, hands down, end of story. And that's a bold statement. That's a bold statement.

• 1:11:53Jocko Willink?

  And I think the other thing is that people that aren't maybe necessarily in that boat, it's important that they learn too. So that you can recognize, look for signs, understand some solutions that you can give to people.

• 1:12:09Jocko Willink?

  And also remember that the darkness that seems all-consuming,

• 1:12:16Jocko Willink?

  we've seen it time and time again, we've seen it. And it's not. It's not. It is not stronger than the forces of good. The darkness will subside and the light will win in the end. So hold on, fight on, drive on. And look.

• 1:12:43Jocko Willink?

  Look into the distance out there somewhere and all that darkness. There is light.

• 1:12:52Jocko Willink?

  And there's hope and there's renewal and rebirth and there is joy and there is this thing.

• 1:13:02Jocko Willink?

  This amazing thing, this crazy thing, this beautiful thing, this horrifying thing, this magnificent thing

• 1:13:15Jocko Willink?

  that we call life.

• 1:13:18Jocko Willink?

  And it isn't easy.

• 1:13:22Jocko Willink?

  It wasn't meant to be easy.

• 1:13:27Jocko Willink?

  But it is worth

• 1:13:30Jocko Willink?

  every second

• 1:13:34Jocko Willink?

  to live it.

• 1:13:43Jocko Willink?

  And

• 1:13:45Jocko Willink?

  with that,

• 1:13:50Jocko Willink?

  I wanted to make sure that, I pointed out that this book,

• 1:13:55Jocko Willink?

  which is 700 and something pages long, actually it's 600

• 1:13:58Speaker 01

  It's after cutting about 120 pages.

• 1:14:01Jocko Willink?

  This book is not in any way, this book is not a book about suicide. This is a fraction, was it five pages, eight pages, something like that? I just wanted to make sure that I covered the subject. I don't think that most people are going to pick up the book and say, oh, I'll cover the suicide section. No, they leave that for me. That's my job here. But the book, it's, what it really is, is a compilation of all the lessons that you've learned talking to all the people that you've talked to on the podcast, which is a wide range of different people, and you've taken that and distilled it down. For those of you people that go and listen to Tim Ferriss podcast and you go, man, I can't get this, it's two hours,

• 1:14:44Jocko Willink?

  two and a half hours, who has two and a half hours? Now you can get it done in 15 minutes, you can get it, the distilled version, the peak knowledge there. And that, that's what the book is, all this information kind of distilled down into nice little digestible pieces, like a reference book that you can look at, which actually, now we're going into question zone, by the way, hot seat, Tim Ferriss, get some, roles reversed.

• 1:15:11Jocko Willink?

  First question.

• 1:15:12Speaker 01

  Can I say something first?

• 1:15:13Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 1:15:14Speaker 01

  So I just wanted to also note for people who might be listening to this and thinking to themselves, well, I'm not prone to depression, I'm not prone to these dark periods. The so-called coping mechanisms that you would use to take yourself from bad to so-called normal, they are also the same strategies you can use to go from normal to better, or from better to far better. They're the same. It's just, it's just shifting into a higher gear.

• 1:15:39Jocko Willink?

  That's a great point, and I use a lot of those strategies. Workout every day, wake up early, get after it. Of course, I read a lot, write a lot. Okay, and you know what? I feel pretty damn good right now. How's that, how's that, how's that map?

• 1:15:55Jocko Willink?

  I feel better.

• 1:15:57Speaker 01

  And to, and to just put a button in it also, I, I, I have, with using these different approaches, for those people maybe listening to this and still feeling somewhat hopeless, the dark periods have gotten shorter, I've been able to turn down the volume, and the joyful periods, the zone-like periods, the productive periods, have become longer and brighter. And you can engineer that. It just takes the right toolkit.

• 1:16:25Jocko Willink?

  Love it.

• 1:16:29Jocko Willink?

  This is a good piece of the toolkit right here. Speaking of toolkit, Tools of Titans. Speaking of the book, this ties into it. The book is filled with all kinds of good ideas and enticing options, and they all sound really good. How do you take and pick the right path and not get distracted by all these other shiny objects that are out there? Especially because the path is laid out and you think, oh, oh, cool, this, oh, this looks really good. You know, I'm gonna do this, do what Tim Ferriss told me to do in this interview, and I'm gonna do that. And then you get a week into it and you haven't, you know, you get, it's hard. You realize that it's hard. You realize that you, you don't like doing that thing.

• 1:17:12Jocko Willink?

  And all of a sudden, you go look for the next solution, and you end up jumping from solution to solution and you never get any progress because you're too busy trying to chase this shiny object. How do you resolve that?

• 1:17:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, is it, this is a common problem. You have, for instance, in the self-help world, you have seminar junkies. I don't really do seminars, but you have people. If you go to a different seminar every weekend, they get all hopped up on enthusiasm, take a lot of notes, they do nothing from Monday to Friday and they hit another seminar. It's like a junkie getting a dope hit, but they don't put in the work. So, the way that you stack the deck is by understanding behavioral modification in a few ways, and you don't have to do a lot of reading about this, but there are a few necessary ingredients. One is, if you just look at the literature, do less than you think you're capable of doing. So, what does that mean?

• 1:18:07Speaker 01

  If you are 100 pounds overweight and you are starting exercise after no exercise for 20 years, do not start off with five days a week of an hour of running on a treadmill. The pass fail threshold is too high, so you set it, first, let's get you to the gym. That is priority, number one. So make it five minutes of walking on a treadmill, two or three times a week, let's just say. Of course, my preference would be weight training, but makes an easy example. Anything beyond that is bonus points. When I write a book like this, which is just a monster, and like you said, kind of a choose your own adventure book, but two crappy pages a day, best writing advice I ever got, your

• 1:18:49Speaker 01

  quota is two crappy pages a day, you don't even have to use them, but if you put out two crappy pages a day, that is a successful day, and it takes away the performance anxiety and the procrastination.

• 1:19:03Speaker 01

  If you've never flossed, you want to floss, front teeth, that's it. Get those pearly whites in the front done.

• 1:19:09Jocko Willink?

  Actually, I got an issue with that.

• 1:19:11Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:19:11Jocko Willink?

  If you break out the floss and you can't floss the rest of your teeth after you're done with your front ones, you've got issues.

• 1:19:17Speaker 01

  Well.

• 1:19:17Jocko Willink?

  Get in the game and floss out your teeth, people. Come on.

• 1:19:20Speaker 01

  So, I think we've got to get people there with the gingerbread trail, maybe appropriate for the flossing conversation, but, so, the point is though, if you want to submit a behavior, you have to break that behavior down into a few pieces. One is just getting out the floss and starting, then the other is finishing the different components to it. So if I can get someone to say, five sessions is my general guideline, make it as easy as possible so that you cement the first five sessions. Flossing to the first, to your front teeth, generally people are going to do more. But you start there. Do it for five days. Don't do more call me. Jocko will send a drone to your house.

• 1:19:59Speaker 01

  With shoelaces. His boots have big shoelaces, folks. Don't let him do it. So, there's that. The other piece that is very underestimated is incentives. And what I mean by that is, I'm actually a guest on the podcast, Derek Sivers, who's an incredible entrepreneur and sort of a philosopher programmer, made millions of dollars, donated it all to music education. He's a real character. But he said, "If information, if more information were the answer, we'd all be billionaires with six-pack abs." More information is not the answer, generally. Of course, there's good and bad information, but I'll give you a great example. And this is kind of a ridiculous one, but it proves a point, which is, I have a friend named A.J. Jacobs. He's a writer.

• 1:20:39Speaker 01

  And he wanted to get into better shape, but he'd never been an athlete, never really worked out, never watched his diet. But there he is. He's got one kid, another one on the way, and skinny Jewish guy. But he described his physique as a python that had swallowed a goat physique. So he wasn't morbidly obese, but just not looking super hot. And he knew what to do. He just wasn't doing it. So he wrote a check to the American Nazi Party for a thousand dollars. And I believe it was his best friend, this like merciless friend he gave this check to. And he said, "If I don't lose 20 pounds by the end of next month," something like that, "I want you to mail this check in," which would put his name, A.J. Jacobs, known writer and Jew, on the list of contributors for the American Nazi Party. He lost the 20 fucking pounds, is the punchline.

• 1:21:23Speaker 01

  And you can use sites like coach.me or stick, S-T-I-C-K-K, where you actually create an anti-charity. So if there's a nonprofit or a charity you'd rather nuke than give money to, you can actually put money into escrow. And if you don't hit your goals, and they have referees and judges and so on, that money goes to your anti-charity. And it sounds so ludicrous. You could also do something simple like a betting pool. I know people who've never lost weight and they, let's say, five coworkers each put in a hundred bucks. And whoever changes their body composition ideally rather than a scale, right? By using a DEXA scan, for instance, gets the pot at the end. And it is incredible how hard people will work to not lose A and then B lose money.

• 1:22:08Speaker 01

  I know two guys who worked at Google, both fatties at the time. And one of them has since lost more than I want to say 80 pounds and run a few marathons. But it started with a commitment to go to the gym together. And if anyone missed the session, they had to pay the other person a dollar. These are people who make a hundred thousand plus a year, no problem. And it worked is the funny part. But incentives, whenever you're like, how can I change this behavior? You need incentives. So give your, give your close friend who you know would love nothing more than to see you humiliated. Pictures of you, your like fat ass, I'm just making this up, but like whatever in like your tighty whities. And if you don't lose X number of pounds by Y point in time, those go on Instagram. End of story.

• 1:22:52Speaker 01

  Like you will lose the weight, I promise you. But there need to be incentives. Humans are incentive driven machines.

• 1:23:01Jocko Willink?

  And so those that when now we're trying to narrow all this information. Do you pick one? Do you set a certain amount of time like, okay, I'm going to stick with this program here. Cattle bell swings at night, right? I'm going to do 75 cattle bell swings at night. Do you say, I'm going to do this regardless of the outcome? And I think you did this with podcasts too. You said, I'm going to do eight podcasts or six podcasts. I'm going to record them regardless of I hate it, doesn't matter. I'm committing to it. So that's sort of a way to avoid distractions on other things as well.

• 1:23:26Speaker 01

  Definitely. So there are two different aspects to that. So the podcasting was a goal, but I always try to set goals where you can win, even if you fail. So these are goals that have side effects that carry over. And Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, talks about this in Tools of Titans, actually. He calls it systems thinking. And in the case of podcasting, he did this with blogging. I asked myself, what can I take out of this in terms of skills and relationships? Even if it bombs as a podcast, I can get better at asking questions, which means getting better at thinking. I can start to minimize my verbal tics, both of which will help me to do research for books later.

• 1:24:05Speaker 01

  And on down the list, there were maybe 10 different things that I would benefit from even if the podcast failed. So six was this critical mass. I tend to do things. In terms of sessions, five or six times, that's usually my experimental minimum. But for a period of time, let's just say behavioral modification, so kettlebell swings, or fill in the blank, some kind of dietary intervention. I'm gonna start with intermittent fasting. Okay, so I'm gonna fast 16 to 18 hours a day. I've done up to 10 days, but let's just say I'm starting with 16 to 18 hours a day of fasting. Then I will measure things. It's a very, I don't wanna scare people off, but scientific approach. Like, you have to know what effect something is having. So you can do that objectively, 0 to 10, how do I feel?

• 1:24:49Speaker 01

  Or you can look at things like number of reps, weights lifted. I mean, I'm up, I have my mug of, my mug of tea in my get after it Jocko mug, approved. Thank God, if I had unapproved, I'd look at all these knives on the table. But I, this is one of my training logs, right here. And I've had these training logs since I was 16. So I like to treat most of my behavioral experiments, exercise experiments, dietary experiments, as a two-week experiment. And that's, that's the minimal effective dose that I'll use in cases like that. And I'll always do the fewest number of things possible. So let's just say you have, you read a book like this, or any other book.

• 1:25:27Jocko Willink?

  I think I take the opposite approach, unfortunately, probably bad. I'll just go as many as I can possibly get, get it done.

• 1:25:35Speaker 01

  So, so for those of you who don't know, Jocko is a cyborg, he's a robot.

• 1:25:39Jocko Willink?

  I know, I'm actually just an idiot.

• 1:25:42Speaker 01

  Poorly programmed robot. But the, the, the reason, here's how I think about it. When I'm looking at goals, or I'm looking at behaviors, I ask myself, alright, I'm really enthusiastic, I have this list of 40 things that I might do. Which of these, if done well, will make the others irrelevant or unnecessary? I'm looking for a lead domino. Which of these will make all of the rest irrelevant, meaning I don't need to do them, or easier? And that is how I choose the behaviors or the goals to focus on. And then, once I have those, just so I can control my variables to the extent possible, so I'm changing my diet and six different exercise routines, and my sleep all at the

• 1:26:25Speaker 01

  same time, I may not know which is contributing to higher reps in the kettlebell swing, right? Maybe the kettlebell swing is killing me, but because I fixed my diet, I'm actually recovering properly. So you don't have to take it to that level. BJ Fogg, F O G G, has done some very interesting work in this area, but... I would say honestly, you want to get good at training yourself and this is gonna sound ridiculous and it is kind of ridiculous. Take a dog training course or train a chicken. Chickens are the most interesting because they don't respond to negative reinforcement. But maybe that's not Jocko's way. You need something you can like hit with a lash. Train a, I don't know what that would be.

• 1:27:03Jocko Willink?

  What do you train chickens to do?

• 1:27:05Speaker 01

  Uh, so if you train a chicken, clearly not.

• 1:27:09Jocko Willink?

  I didn't even know that was actually a thing.

• 1:27:11Speaker 01

  Well, so it is a, it is a litmus test. There, there, there's a couple and I'm blanking on their name right now. Who trained more than 1,500 species for espionage purposes. At one point and they started as marine mammal trainers. So they were training dolphins, orcas, et cetera. And you can't just like roll up a newspaper and bat orca and hit it on the head. For a lot of reasons, but it doesn't work. So they have to use a positive reinforcement. And we, we really get into the weeds with this, but they also use a reward marker. Or a which, or a bridge, which is a clicker in this case, or a whistle. To indicate when the animal's getting closer to the desired behavior. So in the case of a chicken, you could teach it to say turn counterclockwise. Or turn clockwise, take a certain number of steps and then come back to you. Uh, to receive feed, you're only using feed.

• 1:27:56Speaker 01

  Uh, but you know, like one of the quotes that I really liked from a trainer was. You shouldn't be allowed to have a child until you've been required to train a chicken. Uh, and there's a lot of truth to that, but it's just operant and classical conditioning. But any, anyway, I could really go down the rabbit hole. There's a great book called, Don't Shoot The Dog. About this type of training. Uh, but I digress. The point being, understanding that we're all incentive driven. I think is, is, is very important. And then trying to work on one or two things at a time. Because you're only doing it for two weeks in, in the way that I, the mental model that I use. And then you're assessing things. And which by the way, is why I generally recommend if we're talking about diets. So someone who needs to lose a hundred or 200 pounds. And I've had the chance to interact with a lot of these people.

• 1:28:41Speaker 01

  And they've lost that weight. Uh, I will put them on a diet that has the, there are three criteria that I use. When I'm trying to say you design a diet for an intervention for someone. Number one adherence. So of a hundred people I tell to do it, will I have the highest percentage of compliance possible? And you could tell people, hey, the best workout routine for losing weight is taping bowling balls to your hands and doing wind sprints up and down a stadium stair. Well, not too many people are going to stick with that. So you look at the adherence, then the effectiveness, does it produce the desired result? And then the efficiency last in terms of is it, is it time economical, right? Among other things. But the point being, a lot of

• 1:29:24Speaker 01

  folks give me shit on the internet. They're like, what? Slow carb beans, that'll make your intestines explode. And I'm like, A, if your intestines explode, like you're training yourself to be weak. You need to fix your regimen. But like, B, you could throw a thousand people into strict paleo or strict veganism, whatever your religion happens to be, and one out of a thousand are going to make it. Whereas if you use the gateway drug of say slow carb diet, which is more convenient, a little easier to work with, in two weeks, let's say someone who weighs 300 pounds and has 100 to lose, they'll probably lose between five and 10 pounds in the first 10 days. So treating it as a two-week experiment, they now have the positive reinforcement and the results that will lead to A, credibility for me, where I can drive them to do more ambitious things. And step by step, that can then lead

• 1:30:09Speaker 01

  them to strict, say, paleo or whatever. But when you, you have to start with the good program you practice is better than the perfect program you quit. You see this in exercise all the time. People come hot out of the gate and they quit four days later.

• 1:30:21Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. That's, you really, what you talked about earlier is for, for me is prioritize and execute. What you talk about in the book Extreme Ownership is, you know, what's the biggest impact you're going to have? Make that thing, take that thing to the top of the list and start working on that one. Boom, done.

• 1:30:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, totally.

• 1:30:35Jocko Willink?

  All right. Next question. All right. There was a friend of mine that was older than me and he was always looking for the right girl. And the right girl to settle down with and to marry and have kids and all that stuff. And it never seemed to happen. And the reason it never seemed to happen is because he was always looking for perfection. Always looking for perfection. And

• 1:31:02Jocko Willink?

  I told him that, you know, profession doesn't exist. And I also had another buddy of mine that was, we were like surfing and he was always looking for like the next good time. Always looking for, he was looking for happiness, right? And one time we're surfing and I go, bro, you keep looking around for happiness? This is it. This is it, man. We're surfing. This is happiness right now.

• 1:31:33Jocko Willink?

  Do you

• 1:31:36Jocko Willink?

  ever feel like you're searching too much and looking for something?

• 1:31:44Jocko Willink?

  Instead of enjoying what you have?

• 1:31:46Speaker 01

  10 years ago, I would have said yes. Right now, I feel like I've found, I've found a few things, meaning realizations. And I view my job as testing things on the fringe and reporting back. It's like half like ethnobotanist might be eaten by cannibals, plus a little bit of athletic stupidity.

• 1:32:14Speaker 01

  And really trying to find the things at the extreme so I can inform the mean. And as an experimentalist or an experimenter, I view that as my responsibility, my job. And I've also replaced a number of words in my life. So we, we used happiness because it's just the easiest reference point for a lot of folks.

• 1:32:35Speaker 01

  I think that the

• 1:32:39Speaker 01

  better word is excitement. So I, I chase what excites me. Now, that's a razor's edge you gotta be careful with. But when I say excite, it means I wake up excited and I go to bed exhausted, basically is what that means. And I've also realized that

• 1:33:00Speaker 01

  There are things to optimize and there are things to savor. And I don't have a lot of trouble with that. Most people would think that I'm just like speed reading poetry and

• 1:33:10Speaker 01

  watching every movie on like 28x forward with subtitles. Just to cram in as much Mr. Robot as I can or whatever. And no, I, I, I feel like I am increasingly better at the appreciation portion of the equation. The achievement I've always been, I wouldn't say hardwired for, but very well trained for. I'm good at putting goals in the sights and achieving those goals. But if you're constantly looking for the next thing, whether it's the next goal or it's the next girl or it's the next high, then you are never going to be operating in the present tense.

• 1:33:50Jocko Willink?

  Was there something that you said 10 years ago, if I would ask you this, you would have probably been on your heels a little bit. Is there something that happened where you said, you know what, what did I just, you know, did you get home from a trip one time and say, what did I just do? Or was there a moment?

• 1:34:03Speaker 01

  I can tell you, it was, uh,

• 1:34:06Speaker 01

  so this, this is related to something that, you know, Robert Rodriguez, who's the director, producer, writer, musician, everything. He's a fascinating guy, also huge. I didn't realize how big he was. So Sin City, good on the list, right? He's, he has a lot of hits. And he said, I always find it funny, and I'm paraphrasing here, but he's, he's one of the longer chapters in the book. He said, I always find it funny when filmmakers come up to me, brand new filmmakers, and they say, nothing went the way it was supposed to go. Like this happened and that happened and shit broke. And then we missed this shot and da, da, da, da. And he said, they don't realize that that's their job, that nothing is going to work. Like if you're the director, your job is nothing's going to work.

• 1:34:48Speaker 01

  So at one point, I was feeling maybe existentially scattered. I was like, well, I'm trying all these different things and doing all these different experiments. And when am I going to figure out my thing? And then at some point, someone just said, no, your thing is going meta. Like your thing is doing these types of experiments. And what I realized is my, my one thing is learning things quickly. And whether that is cooking or

• 1:35:21Speaker 01

  Sniping, I've taken some sniping courses, that's a separate story. Rally car racing, whatever, right? Tango, doesn't matter. That the approach to deconstructing these things and learning them quickly compounds. So if I get better at one, I get better at the next. It doesn't matter what the subject area is. So that's my one thing. And it just gave me great peace of mind. A, you don't need one thing in a traditionally defined sense. Maybe your thing is, as I have found, you know, being a human guinea pig and trying to train people to be better learners is my one thing. And that, that made me feel more confident in this sort of experimental approach. I don't have 10 year plans and I used to, that used to bother me a lot.

• 1:36:05Speaker 01

  I am no longer remotely bothered by that. Because I have two week experiments and I have six month projects. And if I do my, we, we actually talked about this and you've written about it. But rather than worrying about the, the next 17 promotions, you just do what's in front of you. In my case, say a, a book project. If I do an exceptional job, I knock it out of the park with this one thing, opportunities will present themselves that I couldn't have conceived of six months ago. And then it's just a matter of paddling for the wave.

• 1:36:38Jocko Willink?

  That's awesome.

• 1:36:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I'm a lot better at appreciation than I was along, say 10 years ago. Because 10 years ago, it didn't matter how, how well I did, what I won, what I accomplished. I was always obsessing on the next thing. I never took the time to actually enjoy it.

• 1:36:55Jocko Willink?

  Good lesson. All right. And this is, this is almost down the same line of thinking. So we, we, I kind of see you as the king of outsourcing, right?

• 1:37:05Jocko Willink?

  But for me, my whole life,

• 1:37:09Jocko Willink?

  I was doing a job that I absolutely loved, a job that I wouldn't outsource to anybody, ever. And I feel like I was really lucky and even, even right now, I'm doing this podcast. You know what? I love doing this podcast and people have sent me, hey, we can help you, you know, set up for it and help you. I, I would read books for you and give you notes. I'm like, no, I don't want you to help me read books and give me notes. I'm doing that. That's what I'm doing. So is there a job that?

• 1:37:39Jocko Willink?

  Would satisfy you that you said, or what, let me ask you this, what jobs do you do that you talk, I own this thing and I'm not gonna let anybody else do it?

• 1:37:48Speaker 01

  The podcast, for instance, it's my favorite part of book writing without the book writing. It's fantastic. And, uh, nobody's trying, I don't have some like suit who's paid to manage the bottom line with no creative bone in his body trying to tell me how the podcast should be run. It's fantastic. So I think that, uh, the podcast I could see doing indefinitely. And there are many things like that for me. I mean, I could see doing, well, I'll give an example, just because I have to take the opportunity to talk about tango on the Jocka podcast, just to shape your nuts.

• 1:38:20Jocko Willink?

  We'll edit this out.

• 1:38:22Speaker 01

  So the, the reason I stopped doing it, I mean, I got to, got to the world championships. Uh, but the reason I stopped, I was a semifinalist on the world championships.

• 1:38:31Jocko Willink?

  I, I don't even know, I can't, I can't even imagine what the world championships in tango is. I know tango is a dance, but how do you attack the other people?

• 1:38:42Jocko Willink?

  Like, how do you get them out of the arena?

• 1:38:44Speaker 01

  How do you throw them out of the ring?

• 1:38:45Jocko Willink?

  What happens?

• 1:38:46Speaker 01

  It's, uh, well, it's, it's very delicate.

• 1:38:48Jocko Willink?

  So there's points, is there points or something?

• 1:38:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're judges and so on. It's just like, uh, like a diving competition, zero to 10 kind of thing. But the, the point being, I stopped because I left an environment in which it was highly competitive. I, I went from Argentina where there are dozens, hundreds of world-class dancers to the US where they're just, uh, are a fraction.

• 1:39:07Jocko Willink?

  There's like seven.

• 1:39:08Speaker 01

  A handful, right. Oh, it's, it's, it's Bob again. Okay. Great. Uh, so the, the, um, the one thing honestly is teaching people to test assumptions and become better learners. That's it. That's my thing. So that's the one thing. That's the constant through all the books, through the podcast. Don't believe everything you think. Detached, to use your word, right? Assess and test the assumptions and get better at getting better ultimately. That, that's it for me. But I, there are many things that I do now that I could see doing for a very, very long decades, for sure, including the podcast.

• 1:39:49Jocko Willink?

  Good. Yeah, the podcast, uh, we, we were talking about this earlier. The great thing about the podcast is, is that.

• 1:39:55Speaker 01

  You can do whatever you want.

• 1:39:57Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:39:57Speaker 01

  It can be three minutes long. It can be three hours. It can be thirty hours long. You can talk about whatever you want. No one's gonna eh just do what you want. And that's eh.

• 1:40:04Jocko Willink?

  And if you've written a book, the amount of other people that start to weigh in on that thing, it's it's can be a little bit. That's not oppressive, but it's just not as nice as, hey, I'm gonna turn this on and do whatever I want, which is a good feeling. All right. Eh and and speaking of doing whatever you want.

• 1:40:26Jocko Willink?

  And I know that's kind of how you set your life up, which is awesome.

• 1:40:30Jocko Willink?

  But to take that that notion to the extreme. If you got diagnosed with a horrible disease, and I I try to think of a better way to ask you this question, which isn't like majorly depressing, because this is, but if you got diagnosed with a disease that was gonna kill you in a year or eighteen months. What would you do with those months?

• 1:40:57Speaker 01

  So I role play this all the time. Eh not not because I want to dwell in the darkness, but this is part of the rehearsing the worst case scenario. So not only do I rehearse this for myself, but I try to spend time around people who are going to die. Eh and when I get back to the Bay Area, I actually want to volunteer in a hospice center to contend with that.

• 1:41:20Speaker 01

  There are a few things. So I would I would get my affairs in order relatively quickly. They're already largely in order so that my family would be taken care of. And to be honest, and there aren't many points in my life where I could say this, I would largely keep doing what I'm doing. Honestly, eh I I think that I stopped, for instance, the tech investing about two years ago because I felt like I was replaceable. I felt like if I in a sense, didn't participate, there were a hundred other people in line who are gonna step up and write a check. And that wasn't a unique opportunity, nor a unique skill that I held to.

• 1:42:00Speaker 01

  Hopefully put into the world to benefit people in some way. But, uh, you know, all the ludicrous experiments, some more practical than others. And the podcasting and so on, I feel like I'm putting out the best work that I can. And I think I'd keep doing it. I'd certainly, and, and in the last few years, I've, uh, after reading an essay, I think it's called The Tail End by Tim Urban on Wait But Why about how effectively by the time you're 18 and leave the house, you've spent 80% of the total hours you ever spend with your parents. Uh, I've reorganized my calendar and my year to spend a lot more time with my family, uh,

• 1:42:44Speaker 01

  meaning my parents and my brother. And I think I'd keep doing what I'm doing, honestly, until, uh, until I slip, you know, end up in a pile of dust, which is where we're all ending up.

• 1:42:56Jocko Willink?

  That's where we're heading. Sooner or later. You had, I was listening, I keep wanting to do this. I wanna, when I'm listening to certain podcasts, sometimes I wanna just live tweet, like when I'm having thoughts about them. And I do with Rogan, sometimes I go, man, I should just be live tweeting this. Cause sometimes when he had, who'd he have on? Oh, when, when he had Sam Harris on, I was just, there were so many things that they were saying that were just hilarious to me and I wanted to live tweet. But when you had Shay Carl on, at one point, I can't remember his quote, there was this, you got to this topic and, you know, you, you know, of what you would do. And it wasn't the same question, it was, but it was somewhere in the same thing. Maybe it was about money and you got enough money now, or it was something along those lines.

• 1:43:40Jocko Willink?

  And kind of at the same time, you know, he says, he says something like, you know, just imagine being able to spend all this time with your family. And then you said at the same time, cocaine and whores. And I was like, I wanted to live tweet that. I was like, that's gold.

• 1:43:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, Shay and I had spent a couple of days together.

• 1:43:59Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, classic.

• 1:44:01Speaker 01

  And which, just for those people that don't have any context, he's also raised Church of Latter Day Saints, you know Mormon, Utah. And so I was like, cocaine and whores, which is the nature of my podcast.

• 1:44:16Jocko Willink?

  I thought that was classic.

• 1:44:18Speaker 01

  It's the little things. It's the little things.

• 1:44:20Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that was another one I wanted to live through because he was saying some really classic lines in there as well. All right. Normal day to day, okay? No imminent death that I just placed, but you're healed, my son.

• 1:44:34Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:44:34Jocko Willink?

  No disease.

• 1:44:37Jocko Willink?

  It seems like you've gone through your life going from all these different hobbies. You talked about tango, you talk about jujitsu, you wrestled, you did judo when you were in Japan. Now you're talking, we show up here, you're talking about archery, right? You've got all these different things going on.

• 1:44:51Jocko Willink?

  For me, I've only had a couple of things that have made me feel that way, that thing, right? Number one is combat. That's, that's as good as it gets. For me, jujitsu is the next thing down. It's this empty brain and just awesomeness. And surfing is up there too. Maybe jamming with my band, getting it on in that way. How come you're jumping around so much and is there anything that you always go back to?

• 1:45:25Speaker 01

  So I jump around. I had a, I had a conversation about this with one of my very close friends, Josh Waitzkin. So Josh Waitzkin, for those who don't know, he's the inspiration for the book and the movie Searching for Bobby Fischer. He was a chess, well, considered a chess prodigy. I take some issue with the name. He doesn't like that label either. Very good at learning just about anything. He's also the first black belt under a incredible jujitsu athlete and teacher named Marcelo Garcia.

• 1:45:53Jocko Willink?

  Legit.

• 1:45:53Speaker 01

  Who is.

• 1:45:55Jocko Willink?

  And Echo finally chimes in. When Echo chimes in, he just wants to point out that, yes, Marcelo Garcia is legit.

• 1:46:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, Marcelo is one of the finest grapplers in the last hundred years for sure. And.

• 1:46:09Jocko Willink?

  Which, by the way, makes him the, one of the best grapplers in the history of the world and the universe.

• 1:46:15Speaker 01

  Exactly. Yeah. No, this is, this is completely true. I mean, I, I've. Not to go down the Marcelo rabbit hole, but I had the opportunity to train with Marcelo and it's just another planet.

• 1:46:29Jocko Willink?

  And actually Josh invited me, when I get out to New York, Josh said, hey, come on by the academy. I'm like, okay, yeah, no problem. I'll be there. So what am I going to get out there? He's like, oh, we got geez and everything. He's like, you got everything.

• 1:46:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:46:40Jocko Willink?

  Just like service.

• 1:46:42Speaker 01

  Oh, it's a fantastic school. It's a fantastic school. And he's applied his learning approach to jujitsu. He's applied it to tai chi push hands. He was a world champion and he's, he's applied to a handful of things, but not a lot. He's not as, as frenetic as I am, but we've, we've spent a lot of time together. He's a very close friend and he said, and this is his words, not mine, but he, he feels like I am one of the best people on the planet at getting people from zero to 80% of a skill as quickly as possible. And he's focused on the last 1%, getting someone from 99 to 100. So he works with some of the biggest names in the finance world, people who are very

• 1:47:25Speaker 01

  under the radar to get them from say, beating 99.99% of the competition to 0.999. And I think those are complementary skillsets, but for me, the high that I get is different from the high Josh gets. The high that I get is taking someone, for instance, I didn't learn to swim, we talked about this. I didn't learn to swim properly until I was in my 30s. For a host of reasons I won't bore everybody with. I did a TED talk on, on why that is as absurd as it is, but taking someone who hasn't, hasn't been able to swim ever and getting them in two days to the point where they can swim, say, open water in the ocean for a half a mile, which is completely feasible. It's completely possible for someone who

• 1:48:07Speaker 01

  has some athletic background. That's my high. Showing someone that the impossible or what they thought was impossible is not only possible, but in a timeframe that seems completely unrealistic. That's my high. So I think that's part of the reason I jump around is in part to learn, but it's also being able to teach someone in a way that saves them hundreds of hours and just to see their head go.

• 1:48:33Jocko Willink?

  And you get that, obviously then you get that satisfaction yourself when you try something for the first time.

• 1:48:37Speaker 01

  Oh yeah. Yeah. There's, there's nothing better for me. I mean, when I figure out, for instance, with, with archery.

• 1:48:45Speaker 01

  Blank bail practice and I'm like, oh my God, it's just like dry firing with a pistol. Like to fix your like casting or healing. It's like, oh my, it's the same fucking thing. Oh my God, you know, and then I get all excited because I'm piecing these things together. Or, oh, the way that you train someone, figure out their eye dominance. Like if you're constantly missing basketball shots by like an inch, you probably haven't figured out your eye dominance. It's like, oh, then you shift your center line slightly. So you're raising the ball in a different way. Oh my God, it applies in the same way to bowling, even though no one even talked about bowling. Those types of things get me very excited. I always thought I was going to be a teacher because I had these coaches and teachers in ninth or 10th grade who steered me from this very bad path onto a much better path.

• 1:49:29Speaker 01

  And a lot of my friends growing up, Long Island, ended up overdosing, dying. My best friend growing up was one of them, or drug addicts or alcoholics. And I got steered in this other direction and that ninth, 10th grade window is what I always thought I would go back and teach. So I love teaching. So that's why I jump around. But, uh, what's, what creates the zone for me is partially just that aha moment is exciting for me. So I, I do spend a lot of my time looking for fertile ground. So it's a new skill set. But these skill sets compound. So like the better you get at learning any skill, the faster you will learn subsequent skills.

• 1:50:10Speaker 01

  Uh, but if I had to default to a few activities, I would say it's, and I have to be trying to be smarter about this, but it's a physical activity with a component of danger. That's it. It's a physical activity with a risk with real stakes of some type. So that could be rally car racing, which is very physical. It could be jujitsu. It could be a different martial arts, a Thai kickboxing where I probably spent the most time outside of jujitsu and wrestling.

• 1:50:41Speaker 01

  Those would be the activities that, that put me in the zone by necessity because the penalties are so swift and so immediate and so severe.

• 1:50:53Speaker 01

  Strongly incentivized to not think of the al free runs you're going to hit when someone's trying to kick you in the head.

• 1:51:01Jocko Willink?

  Similar question, next one down the, down the list here. Now, I was with a friend of mine the other day and we were doing some work on his car, just like bodywork, right? You're sanding and then you're polishing and then you're sanding again, you're polishing and you're painting, priming, all this stuff. And there's a certain level of detachment and sort of, for lack of a better word, like a zen mindset, where you're doing this thing, but you're not doing it, right? It's the same thing with cleaning guns, you know, you're cleaning guns, you're just there. It's just a very calming thing, you know, sometimes when I just need to relax, I'll just clean my weapons. I think everyone kind of does that. But do you do, do you do that? Is there anything that you do, that you do that puts you in that state of mind of, that just lets, lets you kind of relax?

• 1:51:43Speaker 01

  Oh, absolutely, there are, there are a number of them and I, I view them as medicine. I need consistent dosing of these things. The first few that come to mind, swimming now, that I do for fun, which blows my mind to this day, because I'm so terrified of it forever, but swimming laps, just a very repetitive left, right, left, right. That rhythm is hypnotic for me.

• 1:52:07Jocko Willink?

  God, somebody asked me the other day, like, oh, do you still swim? I said, no. I, I surf, but I, I don't swim, like I swim enough, my whole, my whole life's been swimming. And I don't swim, like, um, on purpose.

• 1:52:19Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:52:20Jocko Willink?

  So, and the reason somebody said, why, and it's, it's, and I, I said boredom, right?

• 1:52:25Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:52:26Jocko Willink?

  Uh, maybe I need to revisit that, because that, that boredom is, is, can be a positive thing.

• 1:52:31Speaker 01

  It can be, so I find, uh, this is, I mean, one of the reasons that I, this is slightly, this is different, because you do have to pay attention with this one, but dog training. Uh, I, I went really deep with dog training and for a lot of folks, it's really monotonous. Shaping a behavior at a high level is extremely repetitive. And I find it therapeutic, I love it. So swimming would be one, and here's how I make swimming a little more interesting to me. With swimming, I focus on the efficiency of strokes per, per length.

• 1:53:03Jocko Willink?

  So you've got a little challenge going.

• 1:53:04Speaker 01

  I have a challenge, I have a, I have a game. Or I will look at, instead of say, right, left, breathe, and then breathing to the alternate side. So you're breathing every third stroke, I'll try to do every fifth stroke. And I, I have these metrics that I use to keep me motivated, that's the little Scooby snack.

• 1:53:24Speaker 01

  So, uh, cooking, I find something I always hated until maybe three years ago, no more, five, five years ago. I find also very, uh, present state forcing. It's a forcing function for me. When you're trying to figure out five different dishes going at the same time and timing everything, you don't have any slack to think of other things. So I don't, I very rarely cook for one person, meaning myself, but having groups over, uh, we had an entire pig for my birthday a few months ago and spatchcocked, for those who don't know what that is, is you basically splitting it down the middle and then

• 1:54:04Speaker 01

  spreading it out like a pancake. And, uh, we just created this raging inferno in my backyard, uh, with a pig and fish and all this stuff. And everybody was involved, probably 10 different people. And I was not the, uh, the commander in chief for that one. We had, we had a friend who really knows what he's doing. But just one of the most relaxing experiences that everybody had had. Everyone came away from that after two days of being involved and they said it felt like a six month vacation.

• 1:54:31Jocko Willink?

  I think that this is a problem for me, right? In the military, you, uh, starting really early in the military, you eat for time, you eat for, to get fuel in your system. And I'm really not a good relaxed, let's take some time, prepare the meal, sit around and eat it. I'm shovel it in so we can go to more stuff. I don't enjoy that enough. And I love eating. I mean, I love eating, but I don't ever just sit and relax and eat. I'm always in the game, like trying to get that food down so I can go and get after it some more.

• 1:55:03Speaker 01

  Any, any kind of detailed practice for me where I have immediate feedback, uh, is, it can put me into that zone. Uh, shooting.

• 1:55:12Jocko Willink?

  Shooting steel, I was just.

• 1:55:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, shooting steel, uh, particularly if I'm doing any type of drilling at close distance with a handgun. Uh, although there are different types of feedback for me. If I'm doing longer range marksmanship, then I'm thinking more about a lot of my breathing and so on with the, with pistols, you know, if I'm using a whatever Glock 34 or M and P 45, whatever it might be. Uh, the focusing on the subtleties of.

• 1:55:44Speaker 01

  Predicting when you're going to pull the trigger, the flinches and the stutters and stammers that can affect the shot and then making an adjustment and then taking the next 10 shots. I just, I find that endlessly interesting. Interesting isn't the right word.

• 1:55:58Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:58Speaker 01

  Endlessly focusing.

• 1:55:59Jocko Willink?

  That's another thing that the military kind of screwed up for me is because shooting in the military on the best ranges in the world with unlimited ammunition and all, that's what you, it's your job. And so you get in this mode where you're just loving it and, and then you get in the civilian world and you know, you go to the range and the ammunition costs money, right? And you're all angry about that. And then they say, oh, you can't shoot steel in this range. And what about moving targets? What about, you know, I want things? And you just get used to, so you get spoiled in the military a little bit. And there's some great civilian ranges out there as well that, that offer the same thing that I'm, love to utilize. It's awesome. Uh, good. All right. I like that. There's some kind

• 1:56:43Jocko Willink?

  of a dichotomy between Zen state and shooting, but it's all.

• 1:56:46Speaker 01

  And Irish flute, my preferred, I'm kidding.

• 1:56:51Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 1:56:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's cool.

• 1:56:53Jocko Willink?

  All right. Now here's, here's another one. So when I retired from the Navy and got out and started the consulting business, working in one of my risk averse friends that was staying in the military for its, its welfare program, right? It's a, it's a paycheck, right? And he, the guy wasn't, you know, he wasn't all fired up anymore, but he was in and so he had a mortgage to pay and kids to feed. So he's just staying in. And he, he kind of looked at me when I was getting out and I said, yeah, man, I got bills to pay too, but I'm going to go and get after it somehow. And he said, what are you going to do if it, if it, you know, if the business doesn't work and you end up, you know, you're going to come back in and what are you going to do? You won't be

• 1:57:35Jocko Willink?

  able to get back in blah, blah, blah, blah. And I said, bro, worst case scenario, everything goes to hell. Guess what I'm going to be doing? I have an RV. I will be in my RV with my family. We'll be driving up and down the coast of California, raiding jujitsu schools and training and I'll be surfing. And it's all good. And it won't cost me barely anything to do that. My retirement will cover, it'll be good to go. You got a backup plan like that?

• 1:58:01Jocko Willink?

  Well, let me rephrase that. If you needed a backup plan like that, what would it be?

• 1:58:09Speaker 01

  This is one of my favorite topics. So I would say that I have an infinite number of backup plans. And the way I think about that is by doing what I call fear setting. So much like you just said, looking at my goals, the worst things that could happen, the ways I could mitigate that and the way I could get back to where I am now, if all hell struck at once, helps me to remove the fear of taking these steps that might paralyze me otherwise. The second part is by, say, practicing fasting, practicing spending no money for certain periods of time.

• 1:58:51Speaker 01

  I don't fear, I would say, the top handful of things that tend to stop people from taking what they perceive as risks. The other very important thing is that risk has a very specific meaning for me. And I realized early on that people talk about risk tolerance, taking risks. But if they don't define it clearly, it can it can end up being paralyzing in how nebulous it is. So for me, risk is very simple. It is the likelihood of an irreversible negative outcome. That's it. So most things I do, even though people look at it, they say, oh, my God, this guy's investing in speculative startups, when it's just one guy and an idea.

• 1:59:34Speaker 01

  Man, he's a risk taker. I don't view myself that way at all. I view myself as, if anything, someone who's very, has taken a lot of time to get good at mitigating risk. I'm a risk mitigator. And in the case of, say, speculative investing, I am only using money that I can comfortably afford to lose. And for me, backup plan?

• 1:59:58Speaker 01

  Similar to yourself. You know, throw my dog in an RV, get some, get some instant oatmeal, sleeping bag, Yosemite's right in my backyard. I don't know, go find some dirtbag climbers and hang out there.

• 2:00:10Jocko Willink?

  Good to go.

• 2:00:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, go hang out with my parents, get to see more of them, go for a run in the woods. While I'm trying to figure out the next step, it's.

• 2:00:18Jocko Willink?

  And you had that attitude when you were taking more legitimate risks. I mean, right now, obviously, you're, you're pretty good to go. And but, but in the beginning, when you moved out to the west coast, you, you had to have the similar attitude of, because I know I did that, that, that attitude for me freed me. Like, oh, worst case scenario, I lose everything. Cool. I'll still have my RV. It's paid for.

• 2:00:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:00:39Jocko Willink?

  We're good.

• 2:00:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, totally. I, I had that attitude.

• 2:00:42Jocko Willink?

  Surfboards than any other human should ever have.

• 2:00:45Speaker 01

  And, and knives and surfboards.

• 2:00:48Jocko Willink?

  We roll deep.

• 2:00:50Speaker 01

  I, I, I think I had that realization early on. And of course, when I first graduated from school, went out to the west coast. I did not have a lot of money. I remember when I came out to California for the first time for a job interview, I couldn't afford a hotel. I stayed at the Fairfax Kickboxing Gym on the second floor, sleeping on a bunk bed with a Thai instructor sleeping above me and washed my clothes in the sink.

• 2:01:12Jocko Willink?

  Good to go.

• 2:01:13Speaker 01

  And I was happy. I, I mean, I was fully content. I, I didn't feel like I was missing anything. And, uh, but let's not kid ourselves. I mean, when I first moved out, it was 1999. This is at the peak of the bubble. Rental prices are out of control. And I was making 40 grand a year, pre-tax and.

• 2:01:35Jocko Willink?

  Get some.

• 2:01:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. And my, my office, my desk was in the fire exit. I mean, they, they was completely illegal. I was, I, I had to.

• 2:01:45Speaker 01

  I, I had a, a pretty slick setup, but it was very low budget and. Uh, but, but really what I think freed me on some level is realizing in this, hopefully this doesn't sound prickish or arrogant or whatever, but. No matter what difficulties might befall me, whatever. Uh, unemployment might come my way. There are people with fewer resources, with less education, who have figured it out before. And survived. So if.

• 2:02:17Speaker 01

  Dozens or hundreds or thousands of millions of people have figured this out. I'm going to come out the other end and be fine. And so that was very reassuring to me.

• 2:02:26Jocko Willink?

  That is a good one. And

• 2:02:31Jocko Willink?

  we'll move to the next question.

• 2:02:34Jocko Willink?

  Any misconceptions about you that you want to clear up?

• 2:02:39Speaker 01

  Well,

• 2:02:40Jocko Willink?

  you actually, you actually confirmed a misconception for everybody. Tonight, you said, oh, well, you know, Jocko is going to train somebody. He's going to need to beat them. And that's like, people always think that. And it's just so wrong, so wrong, so wrong. I mean, I don't, I'm not going to go into it now because I talk about on the podcast all the time that that stuff is ineffective and you, you actually have to lead people and when you, yeah. So that was a good misconception. You piled on. I'll have to, I'll now spend another five years trying to debunk that and prove to people that I'm not a drill instructor with a lash. But it's good. Thank you. Appreciate it.

• 2:03:13Speaker 01

  Which was deliberate. I'm just done. Jocko is so effective at busting my balls on Twitter and then everyone takes it literally. I'm like, okay, well, I have to take this opportunity. But the, so first misconception, so the cocaine and whores only twice a week, folks. It is, it is not disabling. Uh, that's a joke, internet, by the way. So the, I'd say the biggest misconception is, uh, and it's very understandable. Look, I mean, my book titles, I didn't expect the four hour thing to become a thing. So the four hour work week. Funny story behind that. The, the original idea for the title, and I had dozens, but the one that, that I ended up testing first was the two hour work week, which was about as the amount of time I was spending managing my company at the time.

• 2:03:56Speaker 01

  And some people at the publisher were like, it's way too unrealistic. Two hours a week. And I was like, four hours a week? And they're like, that's so much better. I was like, okay, perfect.

• 2:04:05Jocko Willink?

  Nailed it.

• 2:04:06Speaker 01

  And it sounds like a product you'd see after like the spray on hair and before the rotisserie chicken at three in the morning. It sounds like an infomercial product. So I get it. But the biggest misconception from people who have not read the book or books is that I

• 2:04:20Speaker 01

  Advocate idleness.

• 2:04:23Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 2:04:23Speaker 01

  And that's not the case. I have no problem with hard work as long as it's focused on the right things. So I think of maximizing per hour output. That doesn't mean I advocate dropping a bunch of acid and like watching your cat walk around the house for 12 hours a day. That doesn't do much good for anyone. So that's the biggest misconception. I have no problem with hard work. I just abhor doing something well that shouldn't be done at all. I think that's a waste of skill and a waste of energy. That's the biggest. There are plenty of other ones.

• 2:04:55Jocko Willink?

  You know, something too that you need to watch out for is just because you work hard doesn't mean that you're doing good, right? And there's a bunch of little sayings about that. But just because you're working hard and getting up early and you think you're getting after it, you might be moving a lot, but you're not making any progress. And there's a big difference there. And I think that's something that people need to work, watch out for as well.

• 2:05:14Speaker 01

  Right. So the, for instance, I think the prioritize and execute.

• 2:05:19Speaker 01

  People need to, I think that's such an important starting point. Like what you do is infinitely more important than how you do something. If you have a list of unimportant to do's and you're killing it with the unimportant to do's, that's, that's still a chalking up to a loss.

• 2:05:35Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:05:36Speaker 01

  And

• 2:05:37Jocko Willink?

  You're still losing, my friend.

• 2:05:38Speaker 01

  You're still losing. So for me, it's, when people ask me about time management, I'm like, no, no, no. If you don't have time, you don't have priorities. So focus on the what should you be doing? And for me, you know, The Effective Executive by Peter Drucker is, is the classic there. Don't worry about your apps and your email management and so on. Just read a book that's a few decades old that just talks about prioritizing. So the biggest misconception, yeah, just the whole four hour shtick. That is my blessing and my curse forever. That part. This is another reason why this is my first book without four hour in the title.

• 2:06:12Jocko Willink?

  Oh, hopefully it'll sell.

• 2:06:15Speaker 01

  We'll see. I also lost the Timothy and went to Tim just so I don't have to feel like I'm getting chastised by my mom every time I'm

• 2:06:22Jocko Willink?

  What made you go Timothy on the first ones?

• 2:06:24Speaker 01

  I don't know. Sounded more official. I have no idea. I honestly have no idea.

• 2:06:29Jocko Willink?

  Awesome. All right. We're getting, we got one more question here.

• 2:06:35Jocko Willink?

  You as a leader, right? There's actually millions of people that follow you, right? That listen to you, that respect what you say. And they they truly follow your lead. I mean, clearly, they follow your lead. We saw this with uh with the the launch of or the release. What's it called when a book comes out? When my book came out. Yeah, you had kind of predicted everything that was gonna happen to a T of like, yeah, when we talk about this book, it's gonna, you know, the people going by it. That's good. And so people clearly follow you and and listen to what you say.

• 2:07:15Jocko Willink?

  As a leader, and I don't know if you foresee yourself that way, but you are a leader.

• 2:07:24Jocko Willink?

  Two questions. One, where do you think you fall short?

• 2:07:28Jocko Willink?

  And two,

• 2:07:30Jocko Willink?

  and more important, where are you trying to lead people?

• 2:07:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, these are good. Uh, so I haven't thought of myself as a leader, uh, but

• 2:07:46Speaker 01

  I think that two terms sometimes get used interchangeably, and I view them as very different. So as a leader, if I'm looking through that lens of myself,

• 2:07:59Speaker 01

  I think I'm very good at

• 2:08:03Speaker 01

  affecting national conversations and steering the attention of groups to one thing for sustained periods of time. I think I'm very good at that and helping people to prioritize. If I were to view myself as a manager, I think I have many deficiencies.

• 2:08:22Speaker 01

  And one of them would be, and this has been a help and a hindrance, as many things are.

• 2:08:32Speaker 01

  Impatience. I have extremely high standards and hold myself to just

• 2:08:41Speaker 01

  A ridiculous degree of expectation for perfection, which of course leads to a lot of the problems we've talked about earlier. But on the flip side, I get a lot done in part, I think, because that is a driver. That can also damage relationships very quickly and it can, in a management environment, cause hurt feelings and people do not put forth their best because they feel like they are being criticized and not lauded for their successes. And in part, that is because as an athlete, I really and hopefully this doesn't sound weird, I don't really care if it sounds weird, actually.

• 2:09:21Speaker 01

  In sports and in business, my general feeling was, and I remember a mentor early on said something like this to me. He said, "Don't tell me about the good stuff. The good stuff takes care of itself. Just tell me about the bad stuff." And that's always been my personal policy for myself. But that does not always translate well to team environments. So that, I think, is my homework that, and deficit that I've been working hard to correct for the last few years is getting better at managing people who do not necessarily conform to that mindset at all times, which I think can be

• 2:10:03Speaker 01

  a big problem when it's out of control. But that would be the biggest deficit. But if we're defining leader as someone who can put forth a vision or an objective or catalyze a movement and move attention in people in one direction. I feel like I'm quite good at mitigating the risk of that. Because for instance, people think that the haters, this is a very popular word on the internet, and not all critics are haters, of course. Important to be able to take criticism and feedback, but many people who are thrust into a position where they have the opportunity to lead people virtually on the internet, which is a huge responsibility

• 2:10:49Speaker 01

  and I take it extremely seriously, worry about, say, their detractors causing problems. It's not the detractors, in my experience, that can do the most damage. It's the diehard fans who get the message wrong.

• 2:11:03Speaker 01

  Who get the directive and misinterpret it. That, that is where you have to do damage control and think ahead. So I think, I think I'm quite good at that. As far as where I'm leading people, if I'm leading them anywhere.

• 2:11:16Speaker 01

  I, I've always, I shouldn't say always, but for the last at least five years, thought of my goal as creating a benevolent army of

• 2:11:28Speaker 01

  super learners effectively, who can teach intern

• 2:11:34Speaker 01

  10 additional people each the same skillset.

• 2:11:38Speaker 01

  So to propagate a toolkit that enables people to be

• 2:11:43Speaker 01

  elite problem solvers instead of accidental haphazard problem creators is, has been my goal for at least the last five years explicitly.

• 2:11:55Jocko Willink?

  Teaching people how to learn so they can teach people how to learn.

• 2:12:00Speaker 01

  That's right. And part of learning is problem solving. So you're by, by definition, getting people who are good at dissecting problems, testing assumptions. That's where I'm leading people.

• 2:12:15Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's, that's solid. I mean, that's obviously a really positive thing. I always talk about the fact that, you know, I want to help people learn how to learn. I, I talk about that all the time and I've said that before on the podcast. We'll, we'll teach people how to, not, not what to think, but how to think. And obviously I'm not the same scale that you are in terms of volume of masses of people. But there's definitely

• 2:12:40Jocko Willink?

  some people out there that I think are following me in some way, and that might be a strong word, but I always think that what I'm trying to get people to do, if you're following me,

• 2:12:52Jocko Willink?

  I'm really trying to get you to follow yourself and lead yourself. I don't, I don't, you know, lead yourself. Okay. You see it, my path? That's cool. My path was good. I like my path. Now forge your path. You know, figure out where you want to go, how you're going to get, how you're going to get stronger, how you're going to get faster, how you're going to get smarter, how you're going to get,

• 2:13:16Jocko Willink?

  how you're going to get better. And I always think that those answers work best when they don't come from somebody else, but when they come from yourself.

• 2:13:26Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And I think also the teaching people.

• 2:13:31Speaker 01

  How to learn, enabling my audience to learn how to learn. And when I say that, I mean, 10, 100 times faster than would be expected in a lot of domains. That's only one leg of the stool. So let's say there are three legs. The other two would be teaching them to dissect and manage fear. And then the third leg would be teaching them to be emotionally aware and resilient. And that I think is covered largely by Stoicism. If you take it as a practice and not as something to passively ingest.

• 2:14:05Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And I just talked about Stoicism on my last podcast because somebody hit me up on Twitter and says, do you practice Stoicism? And I was like, no. I just said, no, because I'm pretty terse on Twitter. And, and the guy kind of wrote back, I don't want to say he was offended. And I don't want to rehash the whole story because I just talked about it in the last podcast. But, you know, he said, hey, well, you know, what's wrong with Stoicism? And I wrote back, I'm like, man, there's nothing wrong with Stoicism. I, I, I get it. But for me to say that I practiced it, or even that I learned it from studying the agents is not true. I didn't go to Princeton. You know, I didn't study when I was in high school. I wasn't an overachiever. I was an

• 2:14:45Jocko Willink?

  underachiever. I was a, I was a troublemaker. So I didn't learn anything about Stoicism until much later in my life. My roots aren't, my beliefs aren't founded on what I read. They're founded on what I lived. And it's just, does it make sense? Yeah. When I look at it now, and people have always asked me, are you going to do Marcus Aurelius on the, I'm going to do Marcus Aurelius on the podcast. And, and really, all I'd be saying is like, look, Marcus Aurelius said this thousands of years before I did. Awesome. And I, I would love to be all educated, but I wasn't. I was just, I went down the path that I went down and experienced the things that I experienced in my life. And I came to the same conclusions that.

• 2:15:28Jocko Willink?

  These ancients came to, so it's an interesting dynamic.

• 2:15:32Speaker 01

  No, it is, and I, I think it's worth noting also that if you find anyone who is consistently good at operating at a high level in stressful environments, the tools are the same.

• 2:15:47Jocko Willink?

  Exactly.

• 2:15:47Speaker 01

  I mean, if you read one of my favorite books, Musashi, historical fiction, fantastic book, it's all the same shit. You read that, Stoicism, Stoicism, Seneca was my real introduction, but that didn't come into my life until 2004, so it was after graduation.

• 2:16:05Jocko Willink?

  For those of you that want me to do Musashi on this podcast, I'm not gonna do it, not gonna do Musashi, and I'll tell you why. And if you've read it, you know, you can't, you gotta go through Musashi to get to the end. You gotta go through the whole thing to get to the end. It is one of the best rewards in all of literature to get to the end. And the end, this is a, what's, how many pages is Musashi?

• 2:16:29Speaker 01

  Nine hundred.

• 2:16:29Jocko Willink?

  It's, it's massive book, and it's, and you have to read the whole thing, and it's all good, but it all comes, and it's literally, I think in my copy, because I always laugh about this, it is two or three pages from the end of the whole book is where you get to the end of Musashi, where you go, damn, that just happened.

• 2:16:49Speaker 01

  Yes. Oh, the payoff is so good.

• 2:16:51Jocko Willink?

  Oh, the payoff is so good, and the, oh, and I'm not gonna do it on here, because obviously I'd have to give away the payoff, and so I'm not gonna do that, and you have to go and read Musashi, it's, it's awesome, and the ending is just as good as it gets, it's, it's as good as it gets, and it's historical fiction, but that happened.

• 2:17:08Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:17:09Jocko Willink?

  That's documented.

• 2:17:10Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:17:11Jocko Willink?

  And it doesn't get any better, so read Musashi for yourself, people. Maybe I'll give a, like a one-year lead time, and then I'll do it. One year. Episode 100, maybe we'll do, give people enough heads up, episode 100, we'll go back and do Musashi, if, and I'll give a spoiler alert at the beginning, because Musashi's good, when you get to the end, you go, yeah.

• 2:17:34Speaker 01

  Is that kind of like The Matrix?

• 2:17:35Jocko Willink?

  What's that?

• 2:17:41Jocko Willink?

  Is there like a spoiler at the end of uh The Matrix?

• 2:17:45Speaker 01

  Oh, does it?

• 2:17:45Jocko Willink?

  Kind of, I guess. Oh, man. I gotta watch more movies, apparently. More Echo Charles movies.

• 2:17:50Speaker 01

  Highly recommend Babe. Involves a pig. I think you'd like a Jocko.

• 2:17:53Jocko Willink?

  Didn't you watch that a bunch of times or something? You've got some Babe story, right?

• 2:17:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, I do. So I I tend to, when I write books, so that I don't feel isolated, I will generally, I write late at night. That's when I do my synthesis. So I can do research and interviews and so on. But I'll do my writing generally between 11pm and 5am. And so that I don't feel like I'm sitting in a cave by myself, I will generally listen to the same track or same album over and over again for a given book. That's how I focus. And then I will have a movie playing on mute in the background so that I feel like there are other people in the room. Now, at one point, I was like, alright, I've seen The Bourne Identity 5,000 times. I don't want to see it anymore. I've seen, because that was for the first book. I've seen Shaun of the Dead, which is a comedy, 6,000 times. I don't want to watch that anymore.

• 2:18:44Speaker 01

  Because I'll just, I'll just watch it on repeat. So I might watch a movie five times a night.

• 2:18:49Speaker 01

  Okay, let's go to Amazon Prime. And I pull it up and the first movie that gets displayed is Babe, about a little pig and Farmer Hoggett. And I put it on and I was like, oh, this is hilarious. This is, alright, well, I'll pick a real movie after this. And I was like, good god, this is a fine film.

• 2:19:08Speaker 01

  The Renegade Duck. Anyway, uh, so yeah, yeah, Babe. I don't think you'd actually like it. I think you'd be disgusted with my recommendation, but...

• 2:19:15Jocko Willink?

  I don't watch enough, I don't watch a lot of movies.

• 2:19:18Speaker 01

  I think you'd like Narcos, which is a mini-series.

• 2:19:22Jocko Willink?

  I've heard of that one.

• 2:19:23Speaker 01

  About Pablo Escobar.

• 2:19:24Jocko Willink?

  Right. I think, I've heard about that one. I just, then you're, then you're jumping into what, like 30 hours of content?

• 2:19:30Speaker 01

  That is only, yeah, you're looking at about 20.

• 2:19:33Jocko Willink?

  Yes.

• 2:19:33Speaker 01

  Then you're in the vortex.

• 2:19:35Jocko Willink?

  You know what? You know what I want to watch that? Like when I'm 78.

• 2:19:39Speaker 01

  I'll watch Narcos, put that on my list. Did you have any questions Echo?

• 2:19:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, I have a question.

• 2:19:44Speaker 01

  Echo Charles chiming in.

• 2:19:46Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:19:46Speaker 01

  For the second time.

• 2:19:47Speaker 02

  You know how like, I'm gonna go to entrepreneurship.

• 2:19:51Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 2:19:52Speaker 02

  You know how it feels like anyway that it's kind of become like a trendy thing to be an entrepreneur? Whereas a lot of times like you might even notice people, they don't know what they want to do, they don't know what problem they want to solve or product they want to develop, they just want to be an entrepreneur because it it seems like it's like this cool, the cool thing now. Do you find that to be the case? And if so, is that a good thing?

• 2:20:17Speaker 01

  Yes, entrepreneurship, I think that it is highly romanticized and it's easy to believe, all you gotta do is drop out of college and next thing you know,

• 2:20:28Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:20:28Speaker 01

  You're Zuckerberg.

• 2:20:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:20:30Speaker 01

  And you have a company worth billions of dollars, but that's not how it works folks. And I, so I do think that entrepreneurship is a mindset. You don't have to start a company to be an entrepreneur. It's, and if you were to look at the Spanish equivalent, you know, like emprender to like undertake. It is someone who makes something happen and you can innovate within a company that is not your own, within an organization that is not your own, or you can create a company. So it's someone who makes things happen at the end of the day. So who is it, is it in a, are we in a boom cycle? I think if we're looking at tech entrepreneurship, absolutely. I think that there are certain experiences every human being should have, even if they fail.

• 2:21:13Speaker 01

  I do think that starting a business or enterprise, even if it's a side gig that they moonlight, is worth the education.

• 2:21:26Speaker 01

  But there's a huge survivorship bias out there, meaning, so you open a Barren's, let's say, and lo and behold, you see all these mutual funds advertising, oh my God, they've had incredible returns for 10 years straight.

• 2:21:40Speaker 01

  Well, maybe they're just the mutual funds that happen to survive by luck for 10 or 20 years. They happen to place the right bet. So of the 500, well, the other 490 are no longer advertising. So you're getting a false sample size. And you see that a lot with entrepreneurship. They don't talk enough about the failures. They don't talk enough about the vast majority who will fail. Is it good? I think that it's good for certain groups. It's certainly good for investors if they can play the game well, because even if there are a thousand shitty ideas, that might mean if more people, a higher percentage of, say, high schoolers or college students or otherwise are going into entrepreneurship, that you get an extra

• 2:22:23Speaker 01

  five that change the world at the end of the day. So I am a big fan of entrepreneurship, even though, much like anything else, that is perceived as high risk and therefore treated sometimes with reckless abandon, where people are throwing Hail Marys when they should be doing risk management. You're going to have a high fatality rate. Yeah. And I don't view that as a bad thing necessarily. But I do think that, and this is actually a question that Brian Johnson, who is a friend of mine, he started a company called Brain Tree. It was sold for, I think, 800 million cash to eBay. He settled, huh?

• 2:23:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, he settled. He shows up in Toestens as well, but the question that he has, because he's constantly flooded with various questions from entrepreneurs who want to make 800 million dollars. Say, oh, what should I do this? Should I do that? What about this idea? What about that idea? And he just asks them, is it an itch or is it a burn? And he's like, if it's just a little itch, don't do it. You're going to fail. Because for the other people out there where it's a burn, they can't not do it. They're going to rip your face off. And that, I think, is a very good question. And, you know, the other one, which I think originally came from, let me think about this now.

• 2:23:49Speaker 01

  Evander Holyfield's first coach told him that he could be heavyweight or at the time a probably cruiserweight champion of the world. And he asked Evander if he wanted to do it. And he said he didn't know, he had to ask his mom. So he went back, asked his mom, yes, I would like to do it. He said, well, is that, is that a, is that a dream or is that a goal? Those are two very, very different things. So I, I think that if you feel like you can't not do it, or on the flip side, as I would probably approach it, if you can look at it as a short-term experiment where you're doing a phase one to see if you can develop any traction or get 10 friends to buy, whatever it might be, and you can cap the downside. I always think about this first.

• 2:24:34Speaker 01

  I don't think about the 800 million I might make. How can I cap the downside? Then by all means, you're, you're taking, in my opinion, the measured intelligent approach. Hey, yeah, throw a bunch on the wall and see if anything sticks.

• 2:24:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, because that's not really, like the, the trend, the fad, you know, that I mentioned, that's not really what it says. It's like saying, I mean, now we kind of have this emergence of like the grind, work hard, and that's now that's kind of cool. You know, the, the working 20 hours a week, like that's kind of becoming like, you know, Gary Vee, how he, you know, grind and.

• 2:25:09Speaker 01

  20 hours a day, yeah.

• 2:25:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:25:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. It's, it's, it can work. I think that you just have to be careful. What I would suggest everybody do, and I'm not sure if it's still on Wikipedia, I believe it is, study cognitive biases.

• 2:25:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:25:26Speaker 01

  Humans get themselves into a lot of trouble with cognitive biases, whether it's sunk cost fallacy, you've put X amount of money or time into something and therefore you continue to put good money after bad because you feel like you have to make it back the same way you lost it, or the survivorship bias that I talked about. You have, there's a big difference between correlation and causation, things that happen at the same time and things that, for instance, and things that cause something else to happen. So you, you just have to ask, like, of a thousand people who do X, how many are going to get the outcome that is being showcased? And if the answer is, I don't know, then you should be really careful about assuming that A leads to B, right? And for me, it also comes back to the adherence.

• 2:26:09Speaker 01

  So if I'm trying to coach a hundred entrepreneurs and if I'm talking to three entrepreneurs, it's very case by case, but if I'm talking to a class, which I did for a long time, class of high-tech entrepreneurs, a hundred students hypothetically, I want the advice I give them to apply to the greatest percentage of people in the class as possible or to be usable. And if I say 20 hours a day, there might be one or two mutants who can do that and sustain it, the rest are going to flame out. And for me, in that environment, it's about finding first the good program you can follow

• 2:26:48Speaker 01

  as opposed to the best program that will knock out 99%, but environment dependent. Now, if we're in buds, okay, that's, that might be a different situation. If you're training dogs for say military or police utilization, probably a different story. If you are looking for athletes for ultra endurance competition or 24-hour plus competitions, you are looking for mutants, make no mistake about it. But if I'm trying to encourage the greatest number of people to attempt entrepreneurship and succeed, then I'm going to adjust my advice accordingly.

• 2:27:27Speaker 02

  Hey, do you ever?

• 2:27:28Speaker 01

  I get a lot of sleep, for instance. People are like, oh, I got that Ferris guy, he's a four hour, you must get two hours of sleep a night. I've done all sorts of weird stuff with sleep deprivation. I've done polyphasic sleep where I've gotten whatever it is, two to four hours a night for ages on end. But my default is eight to nine hours a night. I love sleep. I'm sorry, Jocko, but I do love it.

• 2:27:50Speaker 02

  Hey, do you ever get, like, you know how, like, entrepreneurship as like this, the trendy thing to do? Do you ever get annoyed when you see like posers? You know, you know how they subscribe to all the things and then they always want to talk about it and they use all the jargon, you know?

• 2:28:07Speaker 01

  I would say, I'll tell you what annoys me more. I don't mind people who are blissfully unaware and extremely enthusiastic. Because quite frankly, well, I shouldn't speak for everybody, but I think everybody's been there. Like, I remember graduating in 99. Oh my god, was I excited to get into tech and entrepreneurship. Cause I remember this fact, I kinda knew a friend of a friend who sold a company for some ungodly sum of money, 300, 400 million. I was like, what? That guy's smart, but he's not that smart. And it was a very exciting time. And I don't think in that, in that world, that excitement can be undervalued, really. I think it's the fuel. I think it's a

• 2:28:47Speaker 01

  big part of the fuel. The people who bother me are the B players who think they're Elon Musk. Or the, or the once you're lucky, couldn't pull it off, twice or didn't attempt. Like, once you're lucky, twice you're good. The people who had good timing and now think they walk on water.

• 2:29:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, like the, like the kind they start like a course now, those kind of guys?

• 2:29:14Speaker 01

  Oh, there are a million different varieties. And I mean, I'd like, I'd love to see them all run off a cliff like lemmings. I mean, they make me absolutely insane. Because the best of the best of the best, when you meet them, they don't act like dicks. Well, I should take it back. There are probably a few. But in general, they have nothing to prove. They have nothing to prove. Like Marcelo Garcia, he doesn't walk around with invisible lat syndrome. Like, mean mugging people in the street. Are you kidding me? He could, he could destroy all, he just doesn't, he's so far above it, he doesn't care. He's a nice guy to begin with. But, uh, yeah, the folks who walk around with a lot of attitude and are acting, here's the, here's the description. Entitled. People who feel like the world owes them something, those people make me insane. And there's a lot of it in Silicon

• 2:29:59Speaker 01

  Valley. That's part of the reason I stopped all of my early-stage tech investing two years ago. I was like, I'm out. I'm out. This is no fun anymore. For a lot of reasons, but that was one of them. I was like, I'm sick of sitting down with people who have something sketched out on a piece of paper, and now they're asking for $20 million, or a $20 million valuation. I'm just like, what have you done? Hey, good on ya. Great plan. I know you want to change the world, like everybody I've talked to today, with your photo sharing app. Fantastic. What have you built before? Because you walked in here like you're, you know, levitating because you walk on water. And I appreciate the confidence slash arrogance, but what have you actually built?

• 2:30:43Speaker 01

  The entitlement is what I can't stand. And, uh, one of my favorite answers, I ask people a lot of the time, if you could put anything on a billboard, what would your answer be? So there are a few favorites. Discipline equals freedom. That's one. Another is no one owes you anything.

• 2:31:00Jocko Willink?

  That's a good one.

• 2:31:01Speaker 01

  No one owes you anything. It's from a multiple time world champion. And, uh, yeah, I think that, uh, by hook or crook, a lot of the entrepreneurs and otherwise who feel entitled will get served humble pie, whether it's by competition or by the universe. So I don't have to do it myself.

• 2:31:19Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I was gonna say, I don't think this even has anything to do with entrepreneurs. You know, you just get people that are acting that way.

• 2:31:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's how.

• 2:31:25Jocko Willink?

  That's just the way it is.

• 2:31:26Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting. It is interesting.

• 2:31:29Jocko Willink?

  Don't be that guy.

• 2:31:30Speaker 02

  Yeah. My, uh, my brother, he goes to San Francisco from time to time. He has a tech company. And they, uh, he, he, he said, it's interesting that it's this fad now. Like you have like groupies of tech entrepreneurship. Like you have fanboys, you have posers to be a business person, you know? It's not like, you know, like a rock star anymore. It's like, ooh, I'm a tech entrepreneur.

• 2:31:51Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. It's, uh, it's a weird environment, but I, I'm very much of the opinion that as perverse as it might seem, or as perverse as it is on many levels and weird and unsustainable, there's good that will come from it.

• 2:32:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:32:06Speaker 01

  Uh, the more entrance you have in the race, it's just like the more freaks and mutants you're gonna find and those, those people are interesting.

• 2:32:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:32:13Speaker 01

  So I'm cool with it. I'm just gonna wait until there's blood in the streets and the game's a little easier for me.

• 2:32:17Jocko Willink?

  All right. Echo.

• 2:32:22Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:32:23Jocko Willink?

  Um, anyone wants to support this podcast, how should they do it?

• 2:32:27Speaker 02

  They do, by the way.

• 2:32:28Jocko Willink?

  If they do.

• 2:32:29Speaker 02

  I heard, yeah, on Twitter and whatnot. Um, they do. Here's the way. First off, support yourself, as I always say. If you don't know, Tim Ferriss, I know you know about this stuff, but I'm gonna say it anyway. Supplementation. Talk about efficiency from time to time. I know.

• 2:32:45Speaker 02

  Shroom Tech utilizes oxygen more efficiently in your body. That's what Shroom Tech Sport is for.

• 2:32:53Jocko Willink?

  Understood.

• 2:32:54Speaker 02

  Did I already say that before?

• 2:32:55Jocko Willink?

  You said it before.

• 2:32:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, anyway, Onnit has a bunch of stuff that's on it. That's the supplementation that you want to engage in. Because you don't want junk uh supplements. So go onnit.com slash Jocko, get 10 10% off and supplement your wallet as well. And then of course, the Amazon click through. Christmas is coming up.

• 2:33:14Jocko Willink?

  Christmas is coming.

• 2:33:17Speaker 02

  Various birthdays. I'm not going to say when mine is, but it's soon. If you shop on Amazon, click through our website. You can support this podcast in that uh in that way, if you're in the mood to. Um so yeah, you go to the website, JacoPodcast.com, click through and then do your shopping regardless of what you're buying. Whether or not you're buying Tim's book, Tools for Titans, or uh or Duck Tape, whatever, right?

• 2:33:42Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you can buy some Duck Tape on there. You can buy Tools of Titans.

• 2:33:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, you could actually use Duck Tape to make a handle and turn it into a kettle book, as you mentioned.

• 2:33:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:33:49Jocko Willink?

  It's a big book. You can get Jocko White Tea, which is

• 2:33:53Speaker 02

  When though?

• 2:33:54Jocko Willink?

  It's it's back. It's back. We're there. By the time this podcast releases, I think we'll be there. We ordered a ton this time, so you can get it. You can buy the book Extreme Ownership.

• 2:34:05Speaker 01

  And if you don't have enough Jocko, Jocko does make a number of cameo appearances in Tools of Titans.

• 2:34:10Jocko Willink?

  That is right. That is right. That is uh I am in Tools of Titans, which is awesome. And I appreciate you uh you throwing me in there.

• 2:34:17Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 2:34:18Jocko Willink?

  And um and just a ton of ton of other great information. Um I also got some mugs coming. You can buy mugs.

• 2:34:28Speaker 02

  Those are good mugs.

• 2:34:28Jocko Willink?

  They say, they, I tried to keep it simple. You know what they say on it? They say get after it, because that's pretty much their answer to everything, right?

• 2:34:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, and you can kind of tell, like, because it's going to be knockoffs potentially. There's like a an official

• 2:34:42Jocko Willink?

  It's been approved.

• 2:34:43Speaker 02

  Jocko approved.

• 2:34:44Jocko Willink?

  That Jocko approved.

• 2:34:45Speaker 02

  Some people, if they get bumper stickers, which I might mention in a bit, but the envelope that comes, some of them are Jocko approved. That's all I'm gonna say about it.

• 2:34:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, these mugs, these are manly mugs. Uh I could fit probably, yeah, my entire fist into this mug. If you get chased by a cassowary, you could probably crack its skull with this. It's uh it's a very functional piece of uh porcelain ware. Or whatever this is made out of. Carbon fiber, maybe.

• 2:35:11Jocko Willink?

  That's what we do.

• 2:35:11Speaker 02

  Multipurpose.

• 2:35:12Jocko Willink?

  What else?

• 2:35:14Speaker 02

  Well, of course, we have the store. Jocko's store. If you like shirts, if you wear T-shirts from time to time, hoodies, winter coming up.

• 2:35:22Jocko Willink?

  Winter is coming.

• 2:35:23Speaker 02

  States. Australia might be different, but you know, they're the heavier hoodies. But yeah, shirts, if you like shirts and whatnot, check them out, see which one you like. And then if you buy one of those, that's a good way to support the podcast if you're in the mood to do so.

• 2:35:38Speaker 02

  And as Jocko said, the mugs, hey, I'm gonna change the travel mugs.

• 2:35:43Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 2:35:44Speaker 02

  We're gonna improve them.

• 2:35:45Jocko Willink?

  We we we approve that.

• 2:35:48Speaker 02

  There you go.

• 2:35:48Jocko Willink?

  I like it.

• 2:35:49Speaker 02

  There you go. Boom. Yeah. But yeah, go in there, see what up.

• 2:35:52Jocko Willink?

  Subscribe to the podcast.

• 2:35:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:35:54Jocko Willink?

  Subscribe to Tim Ferriss's podcast if you don't already, you probably do. Most people do.

• 2:35:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:35:59Speaker 01

  Check it out, just passed.

• 2:36:00Jocko Willink?

  YouTube.

• 2:36:01Speaker 01

  No, I was just gonna say it just passed a hundred million downloads.

• 2:36:03Jocko Willink?

  Boom.

• 2:36:04Speaker 01

  First business interview podcast to do so.

• 2:36:06Jocko Willink?

  When are you gonna start stepping up your game, though?

• 2:36:08Speaker 02

  I know, smile.

• 2:36:09Speaker 01

  Every day I'm trying to step up my game.

• 2:36:11Jocko Willink?

  And the YouTube channel, which Echo has now begun.

• 2:36:15Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:36:16Jocko Willink?

  To engage in, which is appreciated by all of us.

• 2:36:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:36:19Jocko Willink?

  Me over here, I'm appreciating it.

• 2:36:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:36:20Jocko Willink?

  So thank you for doing that. There's more videos coming out, excerpts.

• 2:36:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I do have to kind of disclose, disclaim, whichever. Oh, so I was going into a through a camera transition phase. So the excerpts, there was a small delay on that, but the the the transition phase is is over and we're good to go. So we'll do more excerpt stuff.

• 2:36:47Speaker 01

  I want to make another disclaimer and disclosure, which is for those of you who see this on video, I apologize for shopping at Gap Kids for my shirt. These guys are fucking huge animals and I wanted to feel more confident.

• 2:37:01Jocko Willink?

  Gap Kids. I like it. Anything else?

• 2:37:05Speaker 02

  Oh, you know, that's it.

• 2:37:06Jocko Willink?

  Also, we did the Extreme Ownership muster in San Diego, California. It was awesome.

• 2:37:15Jocko Willink?

  If you want to come and you're on the East Coast, you want to come, May 4th and 5th, 2017 Extreme Ownership muster, number two in New York City. Marriott Grand Marquis. It's going to be awesome and I'm going to tell you, I haven't said it yet on the podcast, because I wanted to give people the opportunity that are already in the game and are tracking to get there, but it's going to sell out. It's selling really quickly. So if you want to come, buy now. Extreme Ownership muster, you'll probably come to this one.

• 2:37:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's in my backyard, if I'm on the East Coast especially.

• 2:37:50Jocko Willink?

  You missed the first one, but it's all good. I don't hold it against you.

• 2:37:54Speaker 01

  I won't even get into the apology and the explanation. I'm looking forward to number two.

• 2:37:59Jocko Willink?

  Awesome. Uh, Tim, you got any closing comments?

• 2:38:05Speaker 01

  Closing comment, just to bring it back to the very beginning, if you're feeling alone with whatever doubts, challenges you might have, you're not alone. You're far from it. And honestly, at this point, that if I've learned anything from interacting with hundreds of thousands and millions of people on the blog through the podcast, all humans have the same problems. And at the very least, you have a large brotherhood and sisterhood, thousands of people at a minimum, who are feeling, going through the exact same thing that you are. So do not feel alone. And that's, that's pretty much it. I would say, there's some samples up, if people want to check it out, from Tools of Titans. I was, it's surreal for me, but Arnold Schwarzenegger

• 2:38:50Speaker 01

  wrote the foreword, which is incredible. He's in the book. And that's up, the introduction is up, how to use this book. So if you want to check that out, you can just go to toolsoftitans.com.

• 2:39:01Jocko Willink?

  And if you want to continue this conversation, by the way, you can find all three of us out there on the interwebs. You can find us on Twitter, on Instagram, and you know, you can even find us on that Facebook, eboha.

• 2:39:20Jocko Willink?

  Echo is at Echo Charles. I am at Jocko Willink and of course, Tim Ferriss is T Ferriss. Two Rs and two S's on Twitter, Tim Ferriss on Instagram and of course, he's also on that Facebook. He's not hard to find. And to everybody that's listening, I want to say thanks to Tim. Thanks, Tim, for coming on. Thanks to Tim for actually getting me to do a podcast. It was you and Joe Rogan. You, as soon as you pressed record on our first one, you pressed, you pressed stop. You looked at me and said, "You need to do your own podcast." And I was pretty packed for time right then because the book was coming out. But as soon as Joe Rogan said, "Have you two tell me that?", I was in.

• 2:40:03Jocko Willink?

  So, thank you for making me do this podcast. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate all the support that you've been giving me and Echo and the podcast and the book and everything else. Thank you. It's much appreciated. To everybody else that's listening,

• 2:40:18Jocko Willink?

  thanks to you for listening. First and foremost, to the people out there in uniform, military, police, firefighters, paramedics. By the nature of your very job, you are serving all of us. So, thank you for that service and thank you for the freedom and security that you provide us.

• 2:40:45Jocko Willink?

  And rest of the people out there.

• 2:40:48Jocko Willink?

  The troopers out there that have your own battles around the world. Fighting against apathy, fighting against mediocrity, and fighting, like we all do sometimes, fighting against the darkness.

• 2:41:10Jocko Willink?

  To you all, remember.

• 2:41:15Jocko Willink?

  Remember that this isn't easy for anyone. Remember that anything worth anything is worth fighting for. Remember that the battle doesn't fight itself. You are the one that has to fight it.

• 2:41:36Jocko Willink?

  Remember that there's a price for victory.

• 2:41:41Jocko Willink?

  And that price is hard work and early mornings and late nights. And that price is unmitigated daily discipline in all things.

• 2:41:56Jocko Willink?

  In those times when you can't remember everything I just said,

• 2:42:01Jocko Willink?

  just remember this one thing. To get out there.

• 2:42:07Jocko Willink?

  And get after it.

• 2:42:11Jocko Willink?

  So until next time. This is Tim. And Echo. And Jocko. Out.