414: If Your Bear Defeat With Courage and Tenacity, in the End You Will Win. With Tom DeBlass

Join >Jocko Underground< https://www.jockounderground.com/subscribe Tom DeBlass (born May 14, 1982) is an American Brazilian jiu-jitsu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazilian_jiu-jitsu practitioner, submission grappler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submission_grappler and mixed martial artist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed_martial_arts currently signed to ONE Championship https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ONE_Championship. He has competed in the middleweight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middleweight_(MMA) division for Bellator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bellator_MMA and the Ultimate Fighting Championship https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_Fighting_Championship. 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 414 with Echo Charles and me, Jocko Willink. Good evening, Echo. Good evening. One day, a bunch of us were playing. We didn't have slides or monkey bars, so we reverted to basic boy stuff. We found rocks and threw them at things. Of course, we eventually started throwing them at each other. In the beginning, we just threw them at each other's feet, but boys being boys, we were hardwired for warfare. Before long, this kid who had already had a hard on for me, being the smallest and weakest target available, was gleefully throwing rocks at my face as hard as he could. He was a little serial killer in the making. He legitimately got off on watching me be terrified.

• 0:45Jocko Willink?

  I remember being on my hands and knees, asking him to stop as he searched for another rock to throw. The pretense of any sort of game was by then gone. He wasn't even throwing them at me as much as he was just dropping them on my head at point blank range.

• 1:03Jocko Willink?

  I had some sort of a realization that this kid would not stop. He would just keep doing this forever. If I survived today, he wouldn't just be there tomorrow and the next day. Or he would just be there tomorrow and the next day. It wasn't fair. Suddenly, I was standing up with a rock in my hand, a big one. And not a smooth rock like you find on a river in the country. This was a jagged lump of wrecked New Jersey concrete. The kind of rock that scraped up your hand just by picking it up. As the bully closed within arm's distance, I threw a haymaker at him as hard as I could. The punch alone might have rattled him.

• 1:47Jocko Willink?

  It hit him directly on the ear. But with the rock of New Jersey justice in my hand, it did quite a bit more than that. His ear exploded. A combination of the cartilage being burst by the blunt force of the rock and the skin being torn open by its jagged edges. Instead of swelling his ear up, all the fluid the body sent to the ear to protect it gushed out. Everyone froze for a few seconds just to register. Well, except for my bully. He regressed from whatever age he was back to a toddler screaming bloody murder. He crumpled to the ground and curled up in a pitiful little ball of dirt and blood.

• 2:33Jocko Willink?

  That's when he probably was, that's what he probably was anyways, just a frustrated toddler at heart. I'll never forget the other kids staring down at this bully now crumpled on the sand, holding his ear. He had lost 100% of his power. He could come back the next day and try and hurt every single one of us, but he would never be the same. Once you've seen a person shrunken into the fetal position, that's all you'll ever see when you look at them.

• 3:06Jocko Willink?

  His hand was caked with blood and dirt and more blood was steadily dripping out, making more of a mess by the second.

• 3:15Jocko Willink?

  They looked from him up at me. A paradigm shift occurred for everyone in that sand pit. Don't mess with Tom anymore.

• 3:29Jocko Willink?

  And that right there is an excerpt from a book called How You Bear It. Triumph and resilience in life. The book is by Tom de Blas and Tom is a jiu-jitsu competitor. He's a gi and no gi champion. He's also an MMA fighter with fights in Ring of Combat, Bellator and the UFC. He's also a jiu-jitsu and submission grappling coach. He's a teacher with over 50 affiliated jiu-jitsu schools on five different continents. He also runs a charity which is called Buddies Over Bullies, which is very fitting. And that works with communities and individuals to stop bullying and abuse.

• 4:16Jocko Willink?

  And Tom has had a hard journey himself through life, including bullying and abuse. But he was able to stop that cycle for himself and his family. And now he is helping others to do the same. And it's an honor to have Tom here with us tonight to share his experiences and lessons learned. Tom, thanks for joining us, man.

• 4:41Speaker 01

  The honor is mine. Thank you so much for having me here, guys. I really appreciate it.

• 4:45Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's pretty wild as I was reading, reading your book. There's a lot of, a lot of adjacent scenarios going on with ADCC, with trials. Then the timeframe that you were competing in. And I know, I think the first time I ever met you. I don't, you, you may or may not remember this, but I think I was backstage. I was cornering probably Dean Lister and I think you were cornering Gary.

• 5:13Speaker 01

  Yes, sir. At Metamoros.

• 5:14Jocko Willink?

  At Metamoros. Yeah, yeah, that's the first time. I, I might have met you before that, but that's like the first time I remember. But, uh, we were also, but we'll get to it, but we were all from Spain together at ADCC.

• 5:25Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 5:25Jocko Willink?

  I was over there cornering Dean, you were over there competing. So there's going to be some, some interesting crossover of the jujitsu world.

• 5:31Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, yes. Yeah, I, I remember that. I, I remember I was. I was taken back by how kind you were. Not that I didn't expect you to be kind, but when we hear about, you know, military people, I thought the handshake would try to break my hand and you were just a really gentle, nice guy. You know, and I was like, wow, this guy's a really good guy, man. You know, so.

• 5:50Jocko Willink?

  It was cool to like, we're all sitting back there and for whatever reason, I mean, we must've been like either red corner or a blue corner or something like that. But also, I mean, basically we're Americans. You know what I mean? So you're Americans and it's kind of like, oh, what are you guys doing? And I remember we're looking at some, you know, looking at some foot locks, looking at some heel hooks, just kind of brainstorming and stuff like that.

• 6:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, Dean was actually showing Gary something, I believe. Yeah.

• 6:15Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 6:16Speaker 01

  I remember.

• 6:17Jocko Willink?

  It's been an interesting, uh, to watch because I really have had an insider view on Dean since the beginning. You know, when he, when he went and won in 2003 in Brazil, the absolute, and he heel hooked Cacareco, and people have never seen that before. Dean had been doing that move to me for like three years. I was like, bro, this is, of course he's gonna get that, but the position now called 50 50.

• 6:43Speaker 01

  And the fact that you say that he heel hooked Cacareco, and a lot of my listeners have no idea what you're talking about, to me is madness, right? Like you'll say names like Dean Lister, Ricardo Arona, and who's Arona? Who's Arona? You know what I mean? Yeah, man, Dean is such an OG, truly like, he did the impossible. It's quite incredible. And then he came back and he did it again. You know, unbelievable.

• 7:07Jocko Willink?

  It's pretty cool that Donahue gives him like the props that he gives to Dean, cuz you know, he, Dean is not a marketer, right? Dean is not a guy that is gonna go out there and be like, oh, and, and he, he is, he was the best teacher I've ever worked with. I mean, you know, I mean, obviously I'm biased towards him cuz he's my friend and I've been training with him for a long time, but he also is, he, he's not a guy that has the, the mindset to like, make a video compilation or to name, like Eddie Bravo named moves. That doesn't seem like a big deal, but it's kind of a big deal.

• 7:43Speaker 01

  He marketed himself.

• 7:44Jocko Willink?

  It's like, it's like, it's something to do to make people understand that this is your stuff. And when people start talking about Rubber Guard, like there's other people that did that, but Eddie Bravo gave that thing a name and like, this is what it is. And it's like, that's good for him. And he did awesome with it. But Dean doesn't have that mind. And, and so it's very cool that Donahue is cool enough to just be like, yeah, I got this idea for this stuff from this guy, Dean Lister.

• 8:15Speaker 01

  100%. You know, Dean is, he's a simple guy. That's a genius on the mats. And he doesn't care about the business aspect of things. And one thing that I always like, I tell my athletes, like, you know, Dean is Dean, but the fact is, you know, 99% of competitors will never accomplish what Dean has. That's just what it is. And I tell my athletes, I said, And you have to be more nowadays, you have to be more than a competitor. You have to learn the social aspect of things because there's so much behind everything. You know, like you said, Eddie named these these moves. So now people who don't know Jiu Jitsu, they come in, oh, Eddie, Eddie Bravo invented that. Well, Eddie's fantastic, but did Eddie really invent every single thing, you know, you know? And there's a lot of the stuff that that I don't know all the 10th planet names, you know what I mean?

• 8:59Jocko Willink?

  Like, well, yeah, like the Twister is a good example, right? Because the Twister is a guillotine in wrestling.

• 9:04Speaker 01

  But yes.

• 9:05Jocko Willink?

  They call it the Twister. Well, you can't call it the guillotine because we have the guillotine in Jiu Jitsu, but that's a classic thing. And so this is something he took from Eddie Bravo, took it from wrestling and he of course turned it into a six submission.

• 9:15Speaker 01

  He made his own.

• 9:16Jocko Willink?

  And made it his own. And so, yeah, it's the, you know, everyone, there's, there's just some iconic people for sure. Uh, that have gone out there, but and and then Donna, her taking the whole thing and just like turning it into what it is today where it's a huge part of the game and it wasn't, it wasn't a huge part of the game before. I mean, it was not part of the game before.

• 9:36Speaker 01

  It really was 100%.

• 9:37Jocko Willink?

  It was just like Dean. And so anyways, there we go. We already went a little tangential situation. We start talking about that Jiu Jitsu. Uh, but let's get into your life a little bit because your story definitely, I think is going to resonate with a lot of people.

• 9:53Jocko Willink?

  I want to read a little chunk from your book here. We get to the kind of your background.

• 9:58Jocko Willink?

  My father began drinking when he was 12 and his father was a functioning alcoholic as well. They lived in the area when an era when alcoholism was barely acknowledged. There were a few books, fewer, there were a few books, fewer treatment centers and no hotlines. Alcohol was socially accepted, a socially accepted way to cope. I got hints over the years that my father, let's just say he had plenty of things to cope with. You might think a man like this wouldn't tolerate weakness in the sun. But again, he wasn't a typical alcoholic. When I would come home crying because the neighborhood kids picked on me, a sober dad would always was always there to comfort me. I was free to cry around him. He would do what every dad should do. Get on one knee and wrap his arms around me.

• 10:40Jocko Willink?

  He'd tell me that it was okay, ask me what happened and do all that good dad stuff that I try and do with my kids now. In reality, I know my dad wasn't really two people. That's something that children of addicts just sort of need to believe sometimes. Separate the man from the addict. My father was a good person, but he was a complex person. Mentally strong, yet hopelessly addicted. Tender with his son, but able to smash bricks. Not surprisingly, I had many of these same traits from a young age. My mother, Deborah, was on the other side of the deblask coin. She was then and now is the strongest, toughest woman I've ever met in my life. Sometimes I think she deserves a book more than me.

• 11:24Jocko Willink?

  My childhood wasn't always easy, but it paled in comparison to hers. Deborah was born in East Orange, New Jersey, a mainly black neighborhood. And by mainly, I mean Deborah was the only white girl in her high school. Savvy history readers may note that Deborah would have been in the correct time and place for the 1967 race riots in New Jersey, and she was. But that was almost a footnote in her life story. Deborah's mother was born and raised in an orphanage. With no family of her own, I can't blame my grandmother for not being a stellar parent. She married an alcoholic, and the two had a turbulent marriage. My mother was kidnapped when she was five or six and wasn't reunited with her family for years.

• 12:06Jocko Willink?

  Her kidnapper was none other than her own father, a severe alcoholic himself. He took not just my mother, but her infant brother as well. Or he took not just my mother, but her infant brother as well. You might imagine that Deborah's mother would have moved heaven and earth to find her children, but she never really made a serious effort to find them.

• 12:28Jocko Willink?

  So, that's kind of setting the stage, man.

• 12:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, it sounds like a movie. It's quite incredible, and that's just really the tip of the iceberg. You know, my mom read the book, she's like, "Oh, thank God you didn't put the whole entire story in there." And people who read it are like, "Oh, man, your life was so crazy." I was like, "This is the PG version, man." You know? Yeah, my mother was... My grandfather was a... He was an amazing man, but he was kind of similar to my father.

• 12:56Speaker 01

  He was a slave to addiction, but he was a lover. You know, he loved my mother with all of his heart. He loved me with all of his heart, you know? And my grandmother was more of a stoic, to where she didn't really show emotion, but... To preface that, there was one time, my grandmother was in a diner when she was a young girl. And she saw her mother, and she knew who her mother was, her mother knew who she was, cuz she gave her up a few years in. And she said, "Mom." And her mother looked at her and said, "I don't know you," cuz she was with a man, and she just completely denied her. So my mother ended up basically raising her brother, my Uncle David, who died of cancer, God bless his soul.

• 13:38Speaker 01

  He was a, he was a very turbulent man as well, to say the least, in and out of prison. And, you know, my mother, I didn't realize that, I never realized my mother had flaws until I was a parent of my own. Right? Because I basically was like a partner to her. We would come home every day, "Hey, is daddy drunk or is he high?" We would make a bet to where, no, we shouldn't be betting about that. And, you know, it was like, I was her, her ally against him, and we just always stuck together. Because leaving him wasn't an option, because I don't believe she could, she wasn't financially able to. But also at the same time, I didn't want her to, cuz we knew if my mother left my father, he would be dead.

• 14:23Speaker 01

  When I was born, the week after, my mother got a call that my dad overdosed and died in Harlem. And she was on her way to identify the body. And my dad was walking down the street in a hospital gown, they actually said the wrong person died. My dad didn't die, he was alive, but then he disappeared out of her life and my life for like eight months. And when he came back, he thought he was gone for like three days, you know? He had a lot of, lot of, uh, problems, you know, and my mother ended up being, she was ten years older or younger than him. And he met her when she just needed some kind of stability and, you know, even salt looks like sugar, right?

• 15:08Speaker 01

  So she thought she could get that stability in him, and since she's so used to abuse, when he would mess up and be abusive, you know, you just think that's what love is through thick and thin. And we both got used to that abuse, because some days he would be wonderful, and some days he would be Satan. And, uh... I didn't know any other way besides turbulence. Like now I still struggle with like when things are too smooth. I I feel like they they shouldn't be this way. You know, you find comfort in hell. And there's just, uh, I've seen my father overdose and die in front of me and get brought back. And the first time I saw that, I was like four, you know, and it's just a cycle of that nonstop. There's.

• 15:52Speaker 01

  I remember one time he he was really drunk and and he was crying and I was I was a little boy and I was trying to comfort him. And I remember that the he was sweaty because we didn't have air conditioning. Excuse me. I remember the sweat on his chest was like getting all over my face when I was hugging him and he was like. And he started saying how he killed. He's like, I just, I I killed him. I killed him. And at that moment, I realized like, all right, you have a lot of regrets about things you've done, you know? I never asked about who he killed or what he was talking about, or perhaps he didn't kill anyone, you know? Uh, he served, but he went to, uh, Panama during the Vietnam. They didn't send him out to fight. Uh, the thing is with my dad, he was a, he was a good man, like he wouldn't kill a bug, you know?

• 16:37Speaker 01

  He he was, he was very gentle to animals, gentle to people. He would give to the homeless, but when he was not sober, he was just a terrible, terrible human being. And he just kept making the same mistake over and over, right? To to to escape the pain, he would get drunk and high and then only to come back and regret what he just did again and escape all over again. And it became a cycle to why would you say, Dad? Please, just, I forgive you. Just live for today. I don't care about yesterday. But he can never do that up until his dying day. He can never do that.

• 17:13Jocko Willink?

  What drugs was he taking?

• 17:15Speaker 01

  Well, I I only thought he did. I only thought he drank alcohol. You know, I never seen my father pick up a drink. He always would do it. I'd never seen it. It was never accepted. But my junior year in high school, I was a track and field runner. My dad wasn't in the house and I went to uh call my dad because he was saying to my grandparents and my mom was like uh you can't call him. My mom is great at stuff like this. She'll say stuff without prefacing what really she means. So I'm like, what do you mean you can't call him? She's like, he overdosed last night. She didn't say, don't worry, Tom. He he's alive. And I thought he was dead. Uh he overdosed on heroin. So he did all kinds of drugs. He was more of a downer type guy.

• 17:54Speaker 01

  But he was addicted to heroin. Uh he was addicted to alcohol, pills, a- anything. My dad would drink mouthwash if he could get it. What did he do for a living? Like, who who's paying the bills? He was a barber. Uh he had his own business and lost it. Had his own business and lost it. Uh then he had his own business and lost it again. And then he would be in and out of rehab probably about fifty times. My mom would work at the hospital. She would work nights. And then come back and stay with me during the day. So my dad was always out of work and my mom paid the bills for the most part. Or when he did go to work, you know, he would do his best to to pay the bills. But you know, that day he overdosed. That was like a huge wake up call. I went to school that day.

• 18:38Speaker 01

  And uh I broke my long jump school record that day. I jumped uh twenty-two-ten, twenty-two feet, ten inches. And I was just so fired up and I was so upset. And I think a part of me wanted to do it to prove to him, but in the same sense, it broke my heart that I broke the record when he wasn't there because I know when he came out of that coma. That was one more thing that my father missed that would make him go back to the drugs once again. My father missed my own wedding. The the day of the, you know, when I woke up to to go to his house, uh he was in his tux. Passed out on the couch, super high, and uh he just didn't go to my wedding, you know? That's just, it's just how it was, you know? He was on methadone.

• 19:21Speaker 01

  I would take him to the methadone clinic. Uh and then I found out he was taking like twenty Benadryl a day with the methadone to prolong the half-life of the methadone. It's just madness with him, you know? Man, that addiction thing is just, it's it's crazy. It's brutal, you know? It it really is. And I forgive him and I always have forgiven him because who wants to be an addict, you know? But at the same time, now that I'm a father, now that I'm a father, when I look at my own kids, I realize how Awful at times he was as a parent because when I was a not a father, I would look at myself as just a man and he's a man. He's flawed, I'm flawed. And we're just two men. There's a song

• 20:06Speaker 01

  that's a beautiful song. It's a big Samoan guy or Hawaiian guy sings it. I forget the name of it, but he's incredible. And it's just basically like, I don't judge you, you don't judge me. We're just two men that make mistakes, right? So I didn't judge him until I had my own kids. And I'm like, excuse me, I can never imagine putting my children through the things that he put me through and allow them to see what I've seen. It's horrific, you know, and it does a real number on you. And at the same time, I can't imagine how my mom would allow me to be witness to this. But she didn't break the cycle, right? So that's what it came down to. She was

• 20:45Speaker 01

  also very mental in her own right. And I didn't realize that till after my father passed away. But you know, I'm so thankful that he was who he was because I have a very addictive personality, but my addiction became like, you know, sports, bettering myself, you know, exercise. I got addicted to that at a young age and I truly was addicted. And if it wasn't that, if I didn't realize that that alcoholic was within me, which it is, I probably could have been my father. And perhaps my kids could have witnessed all the things that I've witnessed, you know? It's just really tough, man. It's really tough.

• 21:29Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you say in the book here, around the second grade, a teacher began to remark that I wasn't like the other kids. Even back in the eighties, it wasn't hard to diagnose me as depressed. My school referred me to some sort of psychologist. I'll never forget the first and only time I met with him. By the end of our session, he literally had nodded off to fall asleep. I never saw a professional again, but the depression wasn't going away.

• 21:51Speaker 01

  It was quite incredible, like. You gotta laugh. I literally, I didn't know what suicide was as a little kid, but I would, oh, real quick, if you guys hear me clearing my throat, I have something called tics. It's like a minor form of Tourette's. Like, I twitch a lot. I have severe ADHD and I have tics, so I always have something that I'm doing. So if you guys on the podcast listening, I apologize for my, I'm sorry. So, yeah, I just would pray to God for him to take me to heaven every day. You know, I just didn't want to be, I don't know if anybody listening to this saw the movie Powder. It's a really good movie and this guy was, he was an albino and he was just a very good boy.

• 22:34Speaker 01

  And the world wasn't for him, you know, his heart, but he was like magical though. He had powers. I never had powers, unfortunately. But, you know, I would look at, again, I was so soft as a kid, like I would never hurt anybody or anything, never hurt an animal. I never took my anger out on someone else. I just didn't want other people to feel the pain that I felt. And anytime other people felt pain, I would feel their pain. So it's like, not only did I feel my own pain and depression, anytime I saw somebody else that was going through something, and it could even be a sad movie, I didn't know how to compartmentalize things. And all that sadness would just weigh on my back, weigh on my back. And I was just so sad. I just did not

• 23:19Speaker 01

  like this, this world, this earth, and I wanted to get out of here. I didn't know what suicide was, but clearly I was having suicidal thoughts from, you know, six, seven years old on, all the way through until my early twenties.

• 23:36Jocko Willink?

  And then you go into this, and this is pretty early in the book. I was seven years old when it happened.

• 23:46Jocko Willink?

  He was 13. He molested me just one time in his room. It's hard to understate how unprepared an eight-year-old is for sexual activities. I had no real understanding of sexuality, certainly not the particulars. But more than that, I had limited, I had a limited understanding of emotions of any kind. And I didn't even have the words in my vocabulary to understand or vocalize what happened. What I did have was the most damaging thing, a very simplistic understanding of morality. What happened to me was complicated. A child who was very likely himself being abused, abused another child.

• 24:29Jocko Willink?

  It's hard to say what level of culpability or even understanding he had of what he was doing. These are the types of things that legal systems and even philosophers would struggle with. But my seven-year-old mind couldn't discern any of this. Instead, I went into emotional retreat, one that would last well into my adult life. To this day, I think of the child who molested me. He was a victim. He was in his own emotional retreat from someone else. But he still did it, and I was never the same. In the immediate aftermath, I felt enormous guilt and shame. I had read stories about Sodom and Gomorrah from the Bible.

• 25:13Jocko Willink?

  God had destroyed entire cities over homosexuality. A narrative emerged in my mind about what we had done, not about what he had done to me. Molestation was something that the creepy old man down the street did. Having it done to me by another young boy confused me. I didn't know what to call it or how to describe it.

• 25:37Jocko Willink?

  I was seven years old. For these reasons, I told no one.

• 25:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's interesting. That's something I wasn't even going to put in my book at all because I did, I, I didn't, you know, very few people ever knew that. And Louis, my co-author, really said, hey, man, you should probably put this in your book because it could help a lot of men. I just didn't feel like, so my father, he died without knowing it ever happened. It was, I had a lot of morality back then, and I still do now, but at a point in my life, I shut down caring because I had to shut down caring because as long as I cared, I wouldn't be able to live. And he had me, you know, touch

• 26:27Speaker 01

  him. And I wasn't ready. And, and in my mind, I did take part in it, right? I did do it. When I, when I did it, I wasn't thinking, I was seven, I wasn't thinking sexually. You know, he was the leader. I was just doing what he told me to do. And, man, that messed me up. I, I, I still remember it vividly. I went home that night and I, I woke up and I came downstairs and I was crying and I told my mother I had a headache. I remember I was holding my little stuffed, I had a goofy stuffed animal. And I thought I was going to hell for sure. God was gonna take me to hell. But it introduced me to sexuality at a very, very young age. So it almost made me become sort of a, a sexual deviant

• 27:10Speaker 01

  within my own right. I, I understood what certain things were. Never, I, I would watch movies and watch even cartoons and start feeling a certain way. And I, I found like the thought of sex would get me away from the pain that I was in. You know, I, so if my parents were fighting, you know, it's crazy to say, you know, I, I, I started, I was touching myself at a very young age. Anytime something would go wrong, hey, get out of here and go pleasure yourself. And it became almost like a form of therapy. And that's very, very dangerous because...

• 27:52Speaker 01

  You don't understand what's going on and you equate it with madness, actually, because the only time you think of sexual things is simply not to feel good sexually, but it's to feel good mentally to get away from the other pain that you're currently dealing with in your life. Like my father would drink alcohol or shoot heroin. It was different for me and that really affected me in my life. It affected me most because it weighed so heavily on me for so long that I made myself, I had to turn off a switch and become cold. I had to stop caring about things.

• 28:31Speaker 01

  I always said who I wanted to be in this world was a much different person than I ended up being. And it's not until right now, you know, being forty, forty-one, where I could, I could start being who I truly feel I am, you know. Because I was such a soft kid and I had to force myself to become harder, not care, more, without feeling, because as long as I had feeling or care or compassion, I would, I would suffer from my own sins, well, his sins that he cast upon me. But I felt they were my sins, so I had to make myself almost heartless, you know, and I actually started flirting with Satan.

• 29:17Speaker 01

  You know, I read the, the, the commandments of the Satanic Bible and stuff like this. And when you just read them-

• 29:24Jocko Willink?

  Like, how old are you when you're doing this?

• 29:25Speaker 01

  I'm twelve, thirteen, you know, I loved Jesus, but I would-

• 29:29Jocko Willink?

  Where'd you get the freaking Satanic Bible from when you're thirteen years old?

• 29:32Speaker 01

  I would go to the library. The library is four hundred meters from my house, you know.

• 29:37Jocko Willink?

  What town was this in?

• 29:38Speaker 01

  Bayville, Bayville, New Jersey. And I would just research things, you know, and I would start researching in high school, like ancient Aramaic, like the true language of, of Jesus Christ and the lost gospel of Saint Thomas. I started getting really drawn into religion, spirituality. And there's some things you just shouldn't understand, you know. And what's crazy is that the commandments of the Satanic Bible, if you just read them, they sound- Pretty good, you know, and that's exactly how you they could hold you.

• 30:11Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's what they wanted to say.

• 30:12Speaker 01

  You know, exactly. And then this went all the way through into my college years and then I realized I was just getting darker and darker and darker. And I was lost as a human, you know? I thought I was who I was supposed to be, but who I was supposed to be was just a shell of a man, you know?

• 30:30Jocko Willink?

  And you already mentioned, like, you're playing and you talk about in the book, and by the way, get the book. I'm gonna like read like 3% of the book today. So much information in here and the way you wrote it. I talked about it before we hit record, but it's it's written in a very literary way. It's a very, the way it's put together, the way your co-writer Lou, Louis wrote it, it's like, it's it's a great book. So get the book. You know, you start talking about the fact that you were playing sports, you could dunk.

• 30:58Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 30:58Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, which.

• 31:00Speaker 01

  I could touch foul, I could touch the rim from the foul line my junior year in high school.

• 31:05Jocko Willink?

  Damn.

• 31:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:06Jocko Willink?

  When you know.

• 31:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, I high jumped 6'5" my junior year in high school. So I could, I could jump really well.

• 31:13Jocko Willink?

  Damn. You had some bounce.

• 31:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, me, yeah. And your, and your best long jump was 22. 22 10, but I fouled. And that's after I tore my ACL my junior year. I came back with the torn ACL. But I tore my ACL in my, my opposite, my right leg, my jumping leg was my left leg. But I fouled about 70% of the time and I kid you not, man, this one time and it was a home meet, I must have fouled by a hair. And I'm so angry. It still bothers me to this day. We measured it out. We measured it out and it was 24 3. I fouled on all my best jumps. So I remember when I got the long, when I broke that school record, the day my dad overdosed, I actually, I didn't want to foul, so I slowed up before.

• 31:59Speaker 01

  The mark and then I jumped and I thought it was a horrible jump, but I remember I felt a good pop and it was 22 10, man. And I was going against a kid named Vemba Bukala, who was also a 20, he was a 24 foot long jumper and uh, I beat him that day and everybody cheered when I got it. He's like, what'd you just jump? What'd you, because we were buddies. I was like, oh, it was a 19 foot jump. I didn't tell him what it was, you know?

• 32:19Jocko Willink?

  Back him off a little bit.

• 32:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. He was an athlete, boy. Yeah, I got lucky that day.

• 32:24Speaker 02

  652 high jump, that's good. My brother jumped, Jay jumped 6'4".

• 32:29Jocko Willink?

  Hmm.

• 32:29Speaker 02

  Legit.

• 32:30Jocko Willink?

  What was your long jump?

• 32:31Speaker 02

  Long jump, 21'7".

• 32:33Speaker 01

  That's a great jump.

• 32:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, so 22 10, that's no joke. That is not a joke.

• 32:38Jocko Willink?

  What's like a, what's Olympic record material?

• 32:40Speaker 01

  29 1 is the world record by Mike Powell, or no, 29 4 and a half by Mike Powell, but they say Carl Lewis fouled on a, a jump that was over 30 feet.

• 32:51Speaker 02

  And then there was like an 8 foot high jump, right?

• 32:53Speaker 01

  Yes, 8 foot, uh, Javier Sotomayor from Cuba, 8 feet in the high jump.

• 32:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's, but we're talking high school though, you know, for our numbers over here. So let's, let's face it.

• 33:04Jocko Willink?

  Damn. And that's where you said you were just like kind of addicted to training. What was your train, were you training? Like when you look at what the freaking unbelievable training that people get now, what did your training compare to like? To the, to what, to what you did back then?

• 33:17Speaker 01

  So basically, you know, old school, like I had a bar, uh, and some weights. I would do a lot of clean and jerks. I would do a lot of pushups. I would do a lot of, uh, just situps on the, on the board with weighted, like weighted situps. And then I would do a lot of sprints all the time. Uh, so that's basically all it was, like a lot of clean and jerks. My grandfather was really, really big into lifting. He was a lighter guy, like 190, but he would bend the railroad spikes. Uh, he would do chin ups with his fingertips. Uh, he was a state champion wrestler from Pennsylvania and I'm the weakest one in my family by far. Uh, on both sides, actually. My cousin, I posted not too long ago, my first cousin on my mom's side, he's, uh, you know, 6'3", 240 and just shredded. He's a Penn State linebacker.

• 34:01Speaker 01

  And, uh, yeah, I got the, my dad was short but stocky, so I didn't grow as tall as I, I wanted to. I, I say I'm 6 foot, but I'm not. But, uh, Yeah, I just used to do a lot of, I would clean like three, four times a week. Do a lot of clean and jerks. That was my base. Clean and jerks, clean and jerks. I would love them. I, I still feel to this day cleans are one of the best exercises you could do. It just gets everything. So I'll do a lot of dynamic exercises and a lot of sprints. A lot of plyometrics I would do. You know, to believe it or not, I wouldn't change. If I was to do it all over again, I wouldn't change. I would probably do less than I did, but the, the exercises, I still believe in the core exercises. You know, like if you want to get big, you should squat, bench, bent over row, push press.

• 34:47Speaker 01

  You know, the basic things, I think strength and conditioning nowadays. There's a lot that goes into it, you know, you see all the ropes and the this and the that, but I don't know how much I would have got into that, even if it was available to me back then. I think lifting is always like a supplement to your main sport, whatever it may be.

• 35:06Jocko Willink?

  No, I think, I, I think that's awesome. Like that's what I would say you would be doing today if you were in those sports. Like yeah, sprinting, plyometrics, doing cleans. Like those are the kind of core things. I'm impressed that you had that stuff and that you were doing that stuff even back then.

• 35:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, my dad really helped me with that stuff. He knew how to exercise and so did my grandfather. So I was blessed in that sense. He would show me what to do at a young age and then he wouldn't stay with me and do it. He was always supposed to do it with me, but he wouldn't. But I just stayed disciplined enough to, uh, always disciplined, you know, always disciplined to do what I was supposed to do. Whether I felt like it or not. That was imperative, you know, and that's one thing I've always done. And I think really in order to reach success, whatever success is, ultimately my definition of success is finding happiness, right? But I think discipline is imperative, you know? I haven't been motivated in years.

• 35:55Jocko Willink?

  And motivation is gonna get you far.

• 35:57Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 35:58Jocko Willink?

  So you end up getting a scholarship for, for what? For track and field?

• 36:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, the long jump.

• 36:04Jocko Willink?

  And, um, and you end up going to Monmouth, how you say?

• 36:06Speaker 01

  Monmouth University.

• 36:07Jocko Willink?

  Monmouth University. And when you get there, uh, you say, I didn't drink at all in college or for several years thereafter. That's not easy to pull off in college, by the way, but growing up with my alcoholic father, I developed a hatred for alcohol. My primary release from life was still pain, sports and self-inflicted adversity. And I, there's a, there's a point that you talk about here where you. Basically, you say I heated up a metal coat hanger. This when you're sixteen years old. I heat up a metal coat hanger in the shape of a cross and branded it into my shoulder.

• 36:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:36Jocko Willink?

  So you're, yeah.

• 36:37Speaker 01

  I still have the cross.

• 36:38Jocko Willink?

  Oh damn.

• 36:39Speaker 01

  Yeah. I did that when I was sixteen. And in my mind, this we're supposed to feel like, you know, I'm a spiritual guy. And Jesus was crucified. He was brutally beaten and murdered and he felt so much pain. So I still believe till this, like if I was allowed to do this without being looked at as a psychopath. You know, how do you get the guys to whip their backs and stuff like this? Like, I feel it's important for me to have felt pain physically, you know?

• 37:08Speaker 01

  I did, I think there's beauty in it, you know, especially when things get too comfortable. If we're too comfortable, we don't feel pain. I feel it's fake. It's not real. Like I, for me, pain made me feel like I was alive still. And also at the same time, it, it forced me to, to stay disciplined. Like I, I actually have burn marks all over my body. And every time, and I, this is so foolish to do, you know, it's not a smart thing to do. But I'm just telling you how my mindset used to be. If I would push, I would, I would heat a hanger and I would push it in my skin. If I would flinch at all, I would have to do it again, you know? So I would do it until I was able to do it and stay stoic while doing it.

• 37:47Speaker 01

  And again, when you look at it, the psychological reasons, probably because I was forced to think about nothing else but that exact thing that was happening. So I wasn't able to think about the madness in my life. I was just only forced to think about the pain at that moment. Now I could find the same benefits from focusing on my breathing. You know what I mean? Like when you do the box breathing, I could find the benefits in that. So man, there's a lot better ways to do it.

• 38:09Jocko Willink?

  Just.

• 38:10Speaker 01

  But uh.

• 38:10Jocko Willink?

  What were you listening to for music?

• 38:13Speaker 01

  All different kinds. Believe it or not, I would listen to a lot of like, uh, I always listened to rap. Uh, some, some alternative. I was more rap, but I would listen to a lot of like, uh, like the, the spiritual music, like it's almost like creepy church music sometimes when I would get into these moments. Uh, it's like musical. There's one, uh.

• 38:34Speaker 01

  I mean, I could sing and I'm not gonna, but it's uh, it's pretty interesting. I like all kinds of music, but I, I really liked. And I listen, you know, a lot of the rap that I used to listen to, you know, like the nineties rap is very dark. You know, like Onyx, uh, you know, there's a lot of stuff like the ghetto boys. Uh, when some of their raps were very, very dark, you know, and they actually talk about demonic things and uh, what you listen to is important, you know, everything around you, whether you realize it or not, has an influence on you. If you don't realize it, you know, if you don't realize it, it could affect you. And I think that really happened to me. And I think just what I was drawn to were all the things that made me feel tough. It didn't allow me to feel weak anymore, you know?

• 39:19Speaker 01

  Cause my dad would always tell me, your day will come, son, your day will come. And uh, I, I remember, I remember the rock incident very, very well, but there was another incident. I was a freshman in high school and we went to a party and this big football player, for no reason, he was tried to attack, he was a junior, he tried to attack my friend and I and we quick. They got us out of the party. He was just being a tough guy. He was drunk and then, whatever, I didn't take nothing of it. He was large. He was a big guy. Um, next year, we're at my buddy's house and everybody were putting on the boxing gloves, boxing and I always, my dad taught me how to throw hands at a younger age. I'm more comfortable throwing punches than I am jujitsu and uh,

• 39:59Speaker 01

  they said, hey, why don't you, I almost said his name, why don't you and Tom box? And you know, I'll do it, I'll do it. And so I was like, yeah, I'll do it too. And uh, man, I, I uh, I tore his face up. He was leaking everywhere. He was, there were, I remember there were, I went home and there was blood on my shirt and my mom was like, and I was like, don't ask me questions, you know, and uh, that was, that was a time in high school, my, my sophomore where everything changed and everyone saw that beating and he kept trying to stop, but I wouldn't let him stop. I was hitting him just hard enough to where he really couldn't quit, right? But just hard enough to also open him up a little bit. Uh, it was more so like a, a broken nosy hat, but there's a lot of blood comes with a broken nose. And I remember that day, everything my dad said, you know, your, your time will come if you stay patient.

• 40:41Speaker 01

  My day came that day. That was a good day. And I didn't have to fight him in a real way to actually really hurt him. It was kind of, you know, we had gloves on. So it was a beautiful moment. I really liked that.

• 40:52Jocko Willink?

  Combat too.

• 40:52Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly. Exactly.

• 40:56Jocko Willink?

  When you're in college, so now you're going to college, um, you what you you tore your ACL. Is that what happened in college?

• 41:02Speaker 01

  I tore my ACL in high school and I tore all the ligaments in my ankle in college and my jumping ankle. And after I did that, man, I just never had that pop again. I couldn't get that. I couldn't get past nineteen feet.

• 41:13Jocko Willink?

  Did you get surgery on it?

• 41:14Speaker 01

  I didn't. I should have, but I didn't. But I also heard if I got surgery at that time, when you get ankle surgery at that time, I don't know how it is now, it takes away a lot of your mobility. So you'll have strength in your foot, but you need dexterity and mobility in order to jump, in order to push. So I didn't do it. I I don't think anyone could come back as a long jumper after having that kind of ankle injury.

• 41:38Jocko Willink?

  How did you get the ankle injury?

• 41:39Speaker 01

  Playing basketball. I rolled my ankle playing basketball. That was the most painful. I have every I I tore my ACL, LCL meniscus, my right knee. I had ninety-five percent of my meniscus removed in my left knee. I need two shoulder replacements. I'm going to waste to well again. Uh, next week to get stem cells, which helped me tremendously because I have two torn rotator cuffs and two labrum's. Broke my nose three times, broke my hand three times, ripped my hamstring off my butt bone, had a pin surgically inserted in my toe. Uh, tore my bicep, dislocated my elbow, and the most painful thing, oh, and I slipped my disc in my back. The most painful thing I ever did was tear my ligaments in my ankle. That was horrific, man. That pain was just really bad.

• 42:22Speaker 01

  It wa- and and it hurt forever. Like it hurt for a long time, you know?

• 42:27Jocko Willink?

  And is that what kind of, that's how you kind of started venturing towards martial arts?

• 42:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, I started, as a young man, as a young boy, I would do Taekwondo. When I was like five or six, so I actually went back, I didn't know anything and I went back to Taekwondo at like nineteen when I tore my ligaments and I just kept getting in trouble. I would go to competitions and you know, the Taekwondo that I was involved, it wasn't full contact. So if you hit too hard, you get in trouble. So I kept getting disqualified for hitting too hard. So I, so I found the school across the street named Tong Dragon. Eric Cologne was the instructor. Great guy, real sweet guy, but at that time, they didn't have any MMA fighters. They did some shoot fighting, which was open hand. I was training for just a couple of months. I wasn't even a belt in jiu jitsu and I was, they're like,

• 43:18Speaker 01

  oh, reality fighting is coming up. You want to jump in, your opponent's, his name is Richard Thomas, he has no fights, but he was a Marine, he has no fights. Sure, I'll do it. He has no fights, no problem. A week before the fight, Richard Thomas got hurt and they said, hey, David Torelli, he, his opponent got hurt, you know, he, his record is seven and three. He has 10 fights, but you know, he's old. He's 35. He's old. You could beat him. And I said, oh, sure. At that time, I thought I could do anything. I realized at that moment, when I saw him before we walked out, that I was in trouble. And I started trying to pump myself up, you know, and it just didn't work out well. I got, they stopped the fight. They stopped the fight because he literally rained down.

• 44:03Speaker 01

  I didn't tap or nothing. I took that whooping, but man, my nose got broke, my eyes were swollen shut. I looked like I was from the, you ever see Star Wars and their head connects to their nose? I looked like that for like, I remember I went to college and I said, I went to school the next day and people were looking at me like, man, what is wrong with this guy? And that was a learning experience. And then I stayed there like a few more months and then I heard Ricardo Almeida's name. And I found Ricardo Almeida and Kurt Pellegrino and I started training with them.

• 44:29Jocko Willink?

  You, you write here about the, you say, I remember rolling with a purple belt my first day. He was probably 150 pounds soaking wet. How's that wake up call?

• 44:38Speaker 01

  Man, he tapped me like seventy seven times. It was so annoying and frustrating and I, and I just felt like such a little weasel. You know, like I was like one ninety five and he just kept arm bar, every, an arm bar, every time, every time. And you know, you don't really know the sensitivity of a submission at first. You let it go for a while. I, I think there's two types of people. They either tap right away, or they tap right before it's about to get broke. And I was tapping right before it was about to get broken. When that happened to me, I think there's two different ways to react. There's the people who say, you know what? I'd rather just get off these mats, look in the mirror and lie to myself. Or I'm gonna go home, look in the mirror and, and tell myself the truth. And the truth is, you don't know anything. You're an infant on these mats. And I said, I, how could I live?

• 45:19Speaker 01

  How could I survive knowing there's such tiny little men that could do whatever they want to me? To beat me just like I'm a small infant, you know? So I, I got addicted, man. I got addicted.

• 45:31Jocko Willink?

  It's a crazy experience. Especially, I mean, think about how athletic you are as a human being. That has a twenty-three foot freaking long jump and you can jump six feet. Like, that's an athletic dude who's been training, uh, for athleticism his whole life. And a little hundred and fifty pound, you, you give him, so I, I won't read it, but you give some like description like, this guy was a nerd, you know?

• 45:55Speaker 01

  Oh, hundred percent nerd.

• 45:55Jocko Willink?

  And you're just like, okay, cool. I'm gonna smash this guy. You just.

• 45:58Speaker 01

  And, and, and not only an athlete, like I grew up fighting. I fought a lot. So I thought I, I was like, I guess you would consider me a tough street fighter, you know? I, I got in a few fights, good ones. But, man, it's just such a different world. And you truly don't understand. You don't know what you don't know. You know, so when, when you tell people, you tell grown men, like, you will literally get pinned like a, like a small child. They don't get it. Well, if I'm allowed to bite, if I'm, we're allowed to bite too.

• 46:24Jocko Willink?

  Go ahead.

• 46:24Speaker 01

  I got teeth too.

• 46:25Jocko Willink?

  Go ahead, dude.

• 46:26Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 46:27Jocko Willink?

  Go ahead. All you're gonna do is make people mad, dude.

• 46:29Speaker 01

  That's it. You're not gonna do anything but get us annoyed, you know, and, uh... It's such a wake up call. Like, as a man, I mean, let's just say as an adult, like, whether my profession was jiu-jitsu or not, I would not be able to walk around knowing I'm so helpless, hand to hand. You know, I just couldn't do it. And I'm not stupid. Like, I have a buddy, Nick, he was a Marine Raider. And I'm like, listen, man, you drop us off in the woods, naked, you're gonna live, I'm gonna die, right? Put us in a room, one-on-one, I'll be okay, you know? So, I know my limits. But at the same time, what I could control, I definitely want to have as much control over as possible.

• 47:11Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. So, you mentioned Kurt Pellegrino, like, freaking classic, old-school fighter. And you say this in the book, "I was invited to train with Kurt's teacher, Ricardo Alameda. Ricardo was a jiu-jitsu black belt. There was a mystique about him, for one. He had already fought at the UFC, and he was turning his attention toward King of Pancras promotion in Japan. Also, he's the first Brazilian I had ever met. Ricardo did not live up to the stereotype of an easygoing Brazilian. I remember, he was serious and intense. He was Henzo Gracie's first black belt, and it's not an exaggeration to call him one of the top fighters in the world at the time." So, this is what you roll into. You start... So, did you start training with Ricardo Alameda at that time?

• 47:50Speaker 01

  So, first, I started training with Kurt, because he had a school in Tom's River. So, I realized if I wanted to take it to the next level, I had to train with somebody who's done it. And at the time, Kurt was a Pan Am champion in the blue belt division, which was huge as an American at that time. You know, it was only Brazilians winning.

• 48:04Jocko Willink?

  What year is this?

• 48:05Speaker 01

  Man, this has to be like 2004, 2003. Yeah. And then, I started training with Ricardo through Kurt. But Kurt was my instructor at the time, and he was a blue belt, as tough as they come. He was such a... He was a Jersey wrestler, super tough, one of the strongest humans I felt. And that was another huge wake-up call, because I started training with him, like, a few months after I was already training. So, I started doing good at the local school. I was one of the top guys in the local school. Then I wanted to train with Kurt. And again, I was an infant all over again, you know? So, they, how could I leave this guy, when he just knows so much, you know? And I ended up traveling... I became very close with Kurt, traveled to Japan with him, cornered him in the King of Pancras.

• 48:49Speaker 01

  And, you know, Kurt, his career took off. He fought in the UFC, he did well. We ended up parting ways. He ended up moving to Florida and training with American Top Team, and I stayed with Ricardo. But, yeah, I learned a lot from him, man.

• 49:03Jocko Willink?

  So, so now you end up, you got like, you're basically brought into the Hanzo Clan at this juncture.

• 49:09Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 49:10Jocko Willink?

  You got Hyun, Gracie, Half Gracie, Hodger Gracie, you got Estima, like there's some, some people you're training with that are like, they're the best guys in the world at the time.

• 49:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, my main, so I quickly became one of their main, uh, I used to call myself a sparring partner, but I was just basically a beat up dummy, right? I was a tough kid who could get up and again, over and over and over. First time I met Ricardo, he was sparring at Kurtz and uh, he was gonna fight Nate Markhart and he needed a sparring partner and I was like, I'll do it. And uh, he literally like knocked me out of my feet, woke me up again from the double leg he put me on my head with. And uh, I got up and I was like, man, this is amazing. And they're like, we like this guy, you know, he could be good for us. So, uh, I was Hanzo's main sparring partner when he was gonna fight BJ Penn. So we had, it was the training room was me, Kurt Pellegrino,

• 50:01Speaker 01

  Dante Rivera, Ricardo, Hyun Gracie, Half Gracie, and a few others. And uh,

• 50:07Jocko Willink?

  That's a room right there, boy.

• 50:09Speaker 01

  Man, I remember Hyun, Hyun took a liking to me. He would never like talk to me, but he would walk up to me and like, rub my face. And I would just sit there and let him caress my face, right? And then I would bow. And uh, then Half, I remember would get angry with me because he wouldn't wear headgear. So, I never wanted to hit him hard in the head, but then if I didn't hit him, he would get furious. But then if I hit him, he would get furious. So like, you're just getting your ass whooped regardless, you know, but it was such a great experience. And then Dante and I, we would always, we would always get into it. And Ricardo, Half and Hyun, they would find great entertainment in our, in our sparring matches. So, we would just literally put on MMA gloves and beat the heck out of each other, man. Like, we would just fight, like MMA fights.

• 50:55Speaker 01

  Every day, it was the craziest thing ever. That's I say all the injuries I've had. Of course I have all these injuries. I didn't train smart.

• 51:01Jocko Willink?

  Well, they're so much smarter about training now than we were back in the day. I mean, we did the same thing like it was to train for an MMA fight. What would you do? MMA fight, that's what you do. Yeah, well, we're gonna fight, small gloves, no headgear. Let's go rock and roll. That's how we're doing it. And you do that, you know, we do that three, four, five times a week, bro.

• 51:19Speaker 01

  Hard.

• 51:20Jocko Willink?

  I mean ignorant.

• 51:21Speaker 01

  Yes. I was sparring in Trenton and Camden in Philly boxing. And when you go to boxing gyms, it's not a jujitsu gym. Like you're not talking to your sparring partner beforehand. They wanna, they wanna smash your face and especially if you're an MMA guy, especially if you're a white boy walking into Philly, you know? And I can't tell you how many times I've been concussed in the boxing gym, you know, like it's so many times I've took in some whoopings. It's crazy, man. I would, I don't, people say, do you miss MMA? I miss MMA as much as I miss a sore throat.

• 51:54Speaker 01

  That's how much I miss MMA.

• 51:58Jocko Willink?

  There's a little bit of a deviation here in the book. You, at this time, you're like, start realizing you maybe wanna find someone to, like, like a female to be with. You like join a dating site. You kind of talk about some of that stuff and pretty quickly you, you meet a, meet a girl and um she gets pregnant. Um, you use the term elation and terror when you find out that your girl's pregnant.

• 52:21Speaker 01

  Especially when I found out I was having a daughter. My god, bro. You know, and yeah, she got pregnant really quick and I tried to, you know, I had my own home at the time because I opened my academy. I was very successful with it. I didn't have an association yet, but I had my own home. So she moved from Edison to my house and we were just two, still are two separate people, you know, but we both tried to do the right thing and be there and, you know, raise our child together. And I thought like, listen, she's pregnant. She's having my child. She's having Isabel. There's no way we're ever not, we're gonna make it work regardless. If my parents made it work, we can make it work. So she got pregnant again a few years later and my son, Thomas. But we both realized.

• 53:06Speaker 01

  You know, like, it's really hard living with someone when you're two completely different humans. No matter who's wrong or who's right, sometimes you just gotta stop trying to figure out who's right and who's wrong, and you just gotta accept things are what they are, right? There's no point in trying to have someone understand your point because they see things through their eyes, you know? So we realize it's best that we go our separate ways, so we did. You know, I still have my kids fifty, fifty to sixty percent of the time. Uh, I gave her my home, I walked away from it, I gave it to her. I got another smaller home built next to my parents, uh, and it's just much easier that way. I'm a, I'm a much better father this way because I, because when I'm with my kids, I'm a hundred percent with them. You know, I'm a very hands-on dad, and it forces me to do the things that I wasn't doing before.

• 53:51Speaker 01

  Like, every morning, I gotta get them ready for school, I have to pack their lunch, I have to do these things, I have to brush my son's teeth, like, things that dads generally don't do when you're living with their mother. You know, there's, there's usually like a mother's role and a father's role, to where now I have to play both roles, which I'm thankful, it was, that divorce is definitely the hardest, probably the hardest thing in my life, right? But now, I, I realize how thankful I am that my, my kids, my kids never saw their mother and I argue. They, you know, bickering, yes, but they never heard me raise their voice to their mother, and my, my daughter's old enough now to know how my life used to be, and she's very thankful that, uh,

• 54:30Speaker 01

  she didn't have to see these things, you know, so things work out the way they're supposed to in the end, for sure.

• 54:39Jocko Willink?

  And speaking of things working out, you, after that first MMA fight that you described where you got basically TKO'd and the ref stopped it, you, you were like, I'm going back to MMA. You get an amateur MMA fight, um, against some guy who you freaking toe-hold pretty quick, pretty simple, pretty straightforward. Uh, and then, and then you get into ADCC, which, and you talk about in the book, you give it some explanation. Most people that listen to this podcast will know what ADCC is. If you don't, ADCC is like the Olympics of submission grappling. It's the whole world, the best competitors in the world are going

• 55:18Jocko Willink?

  to get invited or make it through trials to get to this stage, which is the ADCC World Championships. They're held in different places around the world, but, and so you're, you're now part of this team, and you say in the book, "In those days, each professional jiu-jitsu organization could send a single competitor to the trials. And at Team Henzo Gracie, it was determined that the best way to choose our trials combatant was to fight it out amongst ourselves." Yes, you read that right. A tournament to determine who could compete in the tournament that determined who would compete in the tournament.

• 55:55Speaker 01

  Yes, we had wrestle-offs.

• 55:56Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and that's what the whole world is doing. So the whole world is narrowing down who-

• 56:01Speaker 01

  Who's gonna represent their-

• 56:02Jocko Willink?

  Who's gonna represent their team, and then from that team, you're gonna go and fight in the trials. And if you win the trials in your geographical region, which is like North American trials, South American trials, European trials, and if you win those, and then there's also a combination of people that have won ADCC in the past or placed in the past, then they get like an automatic invite.

• 56:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's eight invitees and eight qualifiers in the whole entire world.

• 56:28Jocko Willink?

  So, you guys decide, what year is this? What year is your first ADCC?

• 56:32Speaker 01

  2009.

• 56:34Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 56:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I won the trials in 2008.

• 56:37Jocko Willink?

  Yep. And yeah, you, it's pretty cool. It's actually, you say like, hey, this is the in-house tournament that you guys have at Henzo's was like, hey, it's not about, it's not a kiss and tell situation. Like what happens, happens?

• 56:48Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 56:49Jocko Willink?

  And in the book, you're like, hey, what happened, happened, and I, I'm going. So, you don't go, it's one of the few areas in the book where you don't go into much detail. He's like, hey dude, we don't kiss and tell, bro. That's what's happening.

• 56:59Speaker 01

  And I'm still so big on that, man. You know, like I tell my students too. You should not be, and I see it all the time nowadays, people are literally like, they're texting about who they're tapping in training and this and that, and that's a great way to lose trust in your training partners, you know, I was very thankful at the time that I was able to represent my team. Like that was a feat within itself.

• 57:20Jocko Willink?

  Getting out of that room.

• 57:21Speaker 01

  You know, to represent hands was like a dream come true. And before that, like I dedicated everything to jiu-jitsu after MMA fight. Uh, and I ended up like winning the pans, the nationals, the nogi worlds. Glover and I actually, he won as a black belt and I won as a brown belt. The first nogi worlds ever, he won the first nogi worlds as a black belt, I won the first nogi worlds as a brown belt. That's when I think I met him.

• 57:43Jocko Willink?

  Oh, Jeffy Glover.

• 57:44Speaker 01

  Yep, Jeff Glover. And uh, always a mad man, always a mad man. And uh, yeah, I, I, I wanna, I ended up going to Barcelona, what a wake up call. Just a great experience that was to be among legends, right? When your, your idols become your rivals and it was, it was a crazy thing to see. Uh, Dean, Dean, he did.

• 58:03Jocko Willink?

  So this is, so this is 2009.

• 58:04Speaker 01

  2009, Barcelona.

• 58:06Jocko Willink?

  So I think Dean just got the invite.

• 58:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, of course.

• 58:10Jocko Willink?

  Because he had won in 2003, won super fight in 2005 and I think he was injured in 2007 or something like that. So 2009, he might've just gotten the invite.

• 58:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, he didn't have to, I know he didn't have to.

• 58:21Jocko Willink?

  So he didn't have to do the trials, so it's interesting. So we had him and Penny Thomas. So Penny Thomas, she was here at Victory and she was our kids teacher. And you know, training, we trained with her of course too, but so it was, and actually it was Penny Thomas. So the trip to Barcelona was me, Penny Thomas, Dean Lister and Seth Stone. So Seth Stone was, had been hanging out with Penny at the time. And so I was like, hey, bro, you know, like I'm going to Barcelona, wanna come? He's like, sign me up, you know? That's the kind of Seth Stone activities that was going down. So Seth Stone was like my, my best friend and uh, you know, he did jiu-jitsu and everything, but he was dating Penny at the time.

• 59:05Speaker 01

  I remember her, man, she was so tough.

• 59:07Jocko Willink?

  Oh yeah, she's awesome and. So that's who showed up. So we all flew over there and I remember Dean,

• 59:16Jocko Willink?

  he comes down and he's wearing a tank top, like a really nice tank top. And it just says UFC in giant letters like on the front of it. It was like one of those UFC, uh, what was the show he was on?

• 59:31Jocko Willink?

  It was like one of those. I mean, it's just literally like nine inch U.

• 59:35Speaker 01

  And Dean is, Dean is enormous too.

• 59:37Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, he's enormous. And I look at Dean and I go, trying to stay low profile.

• 59:43Jocko Willink?

  Cause there's nothing low profile about that written shirt.

• 59:48Jocko Willink?

  So, so that's what you have. Did you have, you had a meniscus tear going into this? Is that right?

• 59:53Speaker 01

  I had a meniscus tear going into, uh, I believe I did then. I definitely had one going into 2017. But I, I basically, I've always been hurt. I think everyone's always hurt going into their competitions. So many injuries over the years. Um, that ADCC was tough because my, my first match was a cyborg. And the whole entire match, they gave cyborg a negative one and me zero, right? So that I was on top the entire time. So I, I thought I was the victor, you know? We had a scramble at the end. Uh, no one scored. We get up after the match and they're like, wait a second. Oh, we thought you were cyborg and he was Tom. So they switched the negative point. And they gave him the victory by a negative. I'm like, ah, man, that was so, and that actually,

• 1:00:38Speaker 01

  then I competed against Galvall in the absolute division. I lost three to zero. But that, that mess up in ADCC where I got ripped off, that kind of drove me back to MMA. So I kind of, I, I left, uh, jiu jitsu for a few years. I figured I need more control. If I'm, if I was able to knock him out, I would have been okay. You know what I mean? But, uh, it was a great experience. There were so many great, that's when Jacare went against Drysdale. Uh, in the super fight.

• 1:01:02Jocko Willink?

  Okay, yeah.

• 1:01:03Speaker 01

  And that's when Brawley won the absolute division.

• 1:01:05Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, Dean in the ADCC in Barcelona, Dean, he, he won a couple of matches and then he went against Vinnie Magalish.

• 1:01:13Speaker 01

  Vinnie, hell yeah.

• 1:01:13Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and there was zero, zero at the end of, um, whatever overtime and regulation and, and Vinnie got the nod.

• 1:01:23Speaker 01

  They gave it to me. That's when Vinnie won.

• 1:01:24Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and I mean, Vinnie, bro, that guy's not tapping.

• 1:01:29Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:01:30Jocko Willink?

  Like, he's not tapping.

• 1:01:31Speaker 01

  That's when Verdun caught him in that arm bar.

• 1:01:33Jocko Willink?

  And Dean had, you know, put heel hooks on him and stuff like that and he's just like, he's just not tapping.

• 1:01:37Speaker 01

  It was insane.

• 1:01:38Jocko Willink?

  Maybe, does, does he have like Jeff Glover level flexibility or something, Vinnie Magalish?

• 1:01:42Speaker 01

  He must. I think Gordon heel hooked him, right? I think he, he got heel hooked eventually by one person. Yes, Gordon with the inversion. But we didn't think it was possible before that. And I might be wrong, Vinnie, if, if he didn't heel hook you, I'm sorry. I know, I know Vinnie has a victory over Gordon. I think he's like the last one to beat Gordon that I remember. He passed his guard in some kind of event. I forget what the event was years ago.

• 1:02:06Jocko Willink?

  But just think about what we're saying right now. These are the people that are competing in ADCC. It's like Dean Lester, Vinnie Magalish, like, just total, it's, it's freaking monsters.

• 1:02:20Jocko Willink?

  So, you're going back to MMA, my, my, I'm going to the book here. My life was a training montage. Four days a week, I would wake up at four thirty and drive an hour to Ricardo's house. From there, we'd drive an hour and a half to the gym for a two-hour training session. After that, we'd drive an hour and a half to Henzo's Academy in New York, another two-hour training session. Drive back to Ricardo's house, take a nap, train for another hour and drive back home. I'd do this four days a week. The other three, I needed to make money. Took up becoming a school teacher. I'd finished college with my degree in education. I took up a job at a special education school right out of college, teaching severely autistic children. So that's what you were doing.

• 1:02:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, so that training session was all throughout the summer. Uh, not exaggerated at all. And then the other two days a week, I would travel to Bricktown. And, uh, that's like forty-five minutes or forty minutes from me and train with a guy, Bill Scott. And then come the school year, I would teach all day. And then right after the school day was over, I would drive to Ricardo's, which is still an hour, hour and a half away. I would take two classes, teach a class, and I would come home. I would get home around eleven. And then I'd do the same thing all over again. I would do that Monday through Thursday and then Friday I would train in Bricktown. So it was a really hectic. Crazy schedule, but I knew I had to drive if I wanted to get the training that I needed.

• 1:03:36Speaker 01

  But I also knew I couldn't keep up being a school teacher and have this schedule indefinitely and compete at a high level. And at that time, I thought competition was everything. I didn't even think about like, hey, you want to be a school owner and this and that. I just, literally one day I said, hey, I would love to not have a boss anymore. Although, as a school owner, your students become your boss, believe it or not. That's the way it is, man. So you always have a boss, but I wanted to do something that I love to do. My biggest problem as, as working in the real world was people who, people who didn't take care of themselves physically, uh, like bossing me around. And listen, it shouldn't have affected me, but it did, you know? It really did. I was like, how are you gonna tell me what to do? We call that a grudge.

• 1:04:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, how are you gonna tell me what to do when you, you, you can't even beat your, your diet? You know what I mean? And, and I realize that way of thinking is immature because you could learn from anybody. But for me, if the, I don't take advice from people unless I really know that they've done it or they could teach me something. Cause if you take advice from just everybody and anyone, you're gonna be really confused, you know? So I was like, I gotta get out of here, man. This is just no good. And the pettiness that these teachers would argue about and talk about. And I'm like, man, pick and choose your battles. You're making mountains out of molehills. And I, I found that a lot at that time, the teachers, a lot of them really didn't like the kids.

• 1:05:02Speaker 01

  And that would, I was young. I, I was, I was 22 and that would, that would bother me. Like, how are you gonna talk badly about this little kid? Because here's the thing, this little kid, you don't know what he's going through at home. You know, and this is, this is his only shot, right, at a life? And, and one of the kids I actually was a student teacher for, I saw he overdosed on drugs two years ago. You know, and I had him when he was six years old. And then another kid I had, when he was eight years old, we still keep in touch. I just sent him a, my, my, my Garmin watch not too long ago. I mean, he just crashed his truck. I sent him my Garmin watch and, and he got so happy and it made his day and I still kept contact with him, you know? So I think a lot of the teachers didn't realize, some do, many do, that you literally could be a pivotal moment in a child's life.

• 1:05:47Speaker 01

  You know, you're the reason why they push forward or the reason why they don't. And for me, I always looked at kids as... I wanted to help them, you know, so I I figured I could still help if I do things my way. Teach, I could help them to strangle and break bones rather than learn two plus two.

• 1:06:06Jocko Willink?

  You also say this in the book here, um, there was a price to pay for all this. You're talking about your training and how you're living at the time. I'd love to tell you that I was on purpose, doing what I love, and it's true. I felt like fighting was my calling, even if I didn't yet see the pathway to fame and fortune. No one was getting rich off of fighting back then, but at the same time I knew I was unwell. My depression that I had battled with for most of my life had never really gone away. In fact, maybe it had gotten worse. My loneliness had also grown. I probably don't have to tell you that the guys I was seeing day in and day out were not the most emotionally open people. They weren't bad guys. In fact, some of them might have even been supportive and helpful had I spoken to them. But in their world, fighting and training were solutions to everything.

• 1:06:51Jocko Willink?

  The constant war we waged at the gym was a way to deal with our various issues. In desperation, I went to my mother. I told her I needed help, that something was wrong with me. She was 100% supportive and on a Friday morning, I checked myself into one of those places that they never call a mental hospital. But that's what it was.

• 1:07:11Speaker 01

  Yes, now this happened actually in my senior year in college before I became a school teacher. And guys, when I tell you I was, uh, uh, you ever hear when you're like, you're awake, but you can't really get it like you're dreaming? But you see what's going around. It's called something like you're awake, but you can't move. You're it's sleep power. You're like paralyzed in your sleep. I forget what it's called. It's a thing. And that was happening to me a lot and it actually sounds comical like. There was a vent in my college room and the vent would make noises and stuff and I actually, I was getting so far gone. And this is when I was also really, really, really out to library every day, trying to like decipher ancient Aramaic and understand all these things.

• 1:07:56Speaker 01

  And there's such a fine line between good and evil. And when you read the Bible, a lot of the things that were written in the Bible, people forget it was written thousands of years ago. Things are deciphered much different. And I also say, I'm not going to get into it, but you know, man ultimately wrote the Bible. What what happens when? If you tell me some, if I tell you something and you tell Jocko something, by the time it gets to this person, it's probably gonna be a little different than what I initially said. So people put their spin on things. And when you take everything so literal sometimes, you know, I started to think, you know, and if you look into the Old Testament, like violence is not frowned upon, you know, I started to think I was doing wrong by not like eliminating bad people, right? And I would, I was- About to go straight Dexter.

• 1:08:42Speaker 01

  A hundred percent, a hundred percent. And I was, I would actually get to sleep, be paralyzed in my sleep, look at the vent, and I was turning to like, get this, not that I would hear an actual voice, but like, like an urge, like telling me to go do what I know I'm supposed, yes, just like Dexter. And I realized like how close I was literally to being on the front page of, of the New York Post that I just went postal and just took out a bunch of people, right? Like, and I knew like, man, you gotta get help, like you, you need help. But the irony is when I got help, I realized, once I stepped in that mental hospital, how much I really didn't need help compared to some of these people, you know, it was just,

• 1:09:27Speaker 01

  it's, it's madness in there, what, what people are going through in there. And I'll never forget, there was one moment that really stuck out, like, there was this guy in like a wheelchair, but they had like strapped him down and he was like trying to wiggle his way out of the wheelchair. And there was another guy looking at him. And he started screaming, he's wiggling, he's wiggling. And I was so freaked out at the moment. I was like, get me out of here. I tried to check myself out. I'm healed. I, I, yes, yes. I, I tried to check myself out. They wouldn't let me check out. I was like, my God, I went in the room and I started push pressing the chair in the room like 400 times until I couldn't do it anymore. And I just laid down. I was like, what have you got yourself into right now?

• 1:10:08Speaker 01

  And I wrote down, she, the, the woman there, she told me, write exactly all your feelings. And I wrote down my feelings and I gave it to her. She handed it back to me. She said, listen, I'm gonna give this back to you. You're gonna burn it before you ever show anybody because they will lock you up for a long, long time, right? She knew I wasn't sick. She knew I wasn't gonna do those things. I still had the, I, I, I, I knew the consequence of if I was to take action and start offing bad people like Dexter, you're gonna spend the rest of your life in jail, right? Uh, so the consequence outweighed my desire to do certain things. And then, you know, you start thinking, who the hell am I to judge? Who's right and who's wrong? I mean, there's certain people you just know.

• 1:10:52Speaker 01

  They're, they're just not good people, you know, like, uh. But again, the irony in that is I still know my molester to this day. And I have no ill will against him and that's odd. That's very, very odd. I don't understand it. My daughter asked me why as well because if someone was ever to touch my children, you know, I know how I would handle that, but I, I, it's weird and, and, and I asked myself, why don't I have anger or hate towards him? Because that was such a pivotal moment in my life that actually ruined my life in many ways and many senses.

• 1:11:24Speaker 01

  Why wouldn't I hate that guy? Why wouldn't I hate that kid? And, and I think a part of it's because personally I was so used to being abused and taking abuse. Maybe I don't take it as personal or maybe I look at him as he was abused. I don't know, but I, I, that's still something I can't figure out. Why don't I? Why don't I hate him? You know, why don't I hate him? I don't know. I mean, I'm thankful that I, I don't. But, uh, everything happens the way it's supposed to be in the end, I gather.

• 1:11:53Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, the way, I mean, the way you write about it in the book, you have a very detached perspective of being able to see, I mean, you literally write in the book that he's a victim too type thing.

• 1:12:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:02Jocko Willink?

  You know, and that's a very detached perspective for you to be able to get to.

• 1:12:07Speaker 01

  I, and I look at little me as a different human. Like there's little Tom and then there's Tom, right? Like it's two, two separate people, two different people. I, I, you know, I, I couldn't remain little me for an extended period of time and, and make it in this world, you know, you just, I couldn't do it. I was too soft. I was too sensitive. I was too caring. I was too abused. I was too helpless. Uh. So yeah, I did detach myself in many, many ways. I detached myself completely from my childhood. Uh, and then I went through like a, a nomad state where I became kind of, I guess, lost. I thought I was found, but I wasn't. I was lost. And then I think it wasn't until my late thirties to where I really started.

• 1:12:46Speaker 01

  Finding out, like, I was successful in monetary terms and, you know, in my field. But, I mean, again, if you think success is happiness, I wasn't successful until the last few years. Right, when I really figured out a lot of things about myself and, you know, when you don't compare yourself to other people. That's why I don't have any interest in competition because I'm obsessed with being better than who I was. But I don't really care about being better than that person or this person. But again, I say irony a lot, like I tell my athletes, I said, the irony of jiu-jitsu is you all want to beat another person, but in order to beat another person, you have to dominate your own self first. Right, so once you could dominate yourself, then you can think about dominating that man.

• 1:13:29Speaker 01

  And chances are, if you become the absolute best version of yourself, you're most likely going to be better than a lot of other people. Right, because most people aren't looking to become the best version of themselves. Right, they're not looking to do so. So if you want to be a competitor, how do you beat this person and that person? How? You don't put your focus on them, you put your focus on yourself. You do everything that you could do. You control what you can control because you can't control everything. You could control yourself, right? So when you become the best version of yourself, most likely, that's going to be good enough to succeed, I feel.

• 1:14:00Jocko Willink?

  No doubt. And what's holding most people up isn't, isn't their opponent, it's themselves. It's that they didn't train hard enough, they didn't humble themselves, they didn't work on their weaknesses, they didn't go to train when they needed to go train, like, that's all because of them, not because of their opponent.

• 1:14:14Speaker 01

  A hundred percent. The mind is either your best friend or your worst enemy. You know, and there is such a battle, an eternal struggle. And then the worst is when you, you find your athletes that are just so talented and so incredible, and then they get out there. And you know how many times we hear, this person's a beast in the training room, but they just don't compete well. You know, because they, they kind of freeze underneath the bright lights. And I, and I try to get into my athletes' mind, like, listen. It's your preparation that I'm the most proud of, how you prepare. If you do all the right things, I'm super proud of you. Now, you winning in this competition is just, it's a gift that you're giving to yourself and me to celebrate all the hard work that you deserved to get. That's how I'm very big in, I don't want the athlete that just go out there and win without training. I'm really not interested in that.

• 1:14:58Speaker 01

  I want someone who's willing to prepare, to sacrifice, to put forth the effort. So then we could celebrate a worthy cause. You know, we could celebrate something that they earned, something that I earned working with them. And that's, that's the beauty in victory in competition. And when my athletes put in all the work, and then I know somebody beats them because at the given time, my athlete doesn't show up mentally, it breaks my heart. For some of my own selfish reasons, for sure, but also because I know what they did deserve. You know, last week, all my athletes, they just, I said, "If you just listen, you will win. If you listen, you will win." They all listened. It was an event called Men of War, and they all just did phenomenal.

• 1:15:39Speaker 01

  Not one of them allowed their opponent to get off one offensive technique. And the thing is, jiu-jitsu is so common to life because I tell my athletes, "If you just focus..." I actually heard Dean Lister say one time, he said, "If I could stay in the moment, no one could beat me if I could stay in the moment." What's the moment? Everybody wants to win. Okay, but before you win, what do you gotta do? You gotta show up, you know, step by step, second by second, minute by minute, match by match. What are you doing between matches? How do you breathe? How do you recover? So I tell my athletes, every time someone's grabbing you, every time someone's touching you, they're doing so for a reason. You're getting caught in a submission because you're not reacting.

• 1:16:22Speaker 01

  When someone takes your back and strangles you, don't just say you got your back taken and strangled. How did they get to their back? They passed your guard, they put their hand in a place that you didn't address. So my athletes this time, they addressed every single grip, every single thing that the person... You know, my student Cameron, he got a leg lock on a guy Esteban. Esteban's a known little, he's a killer man. He's ranked seven in the world at like 125, and I've never seen this guy get submitted before. And... He didn't react. Cameron got above the knee line. His legs are like 18 inches, this kid. So it's like impossible, like like Cam got above the knee line. He didn't react. Boom, he got healed, you know?

• 1:17:00Jocko Willink?

  Uh, jujitsu works.

• 1:17:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, man. And you know, a- and it's just like, when you really, when you take the approach in jujitsu like you should take in life, it's gonna be very hard to not find success, you know? Step by step, second by second, address everything. Don't overlook anything.

• 1:17:19Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, well, these are the lessons that they take a while to figure out sometimes. Uh, you know, you you talk about in the book and you kind of mentioned like you won nationals, you won no gi worlds. At this time, you're training um with the Henzo Gracie team, which includes people like Matt Sarah, George St Pierre, Ricard- Ricardo Alameda, and you're like saying you're in that group, you know, that was part of, you were part of that crew.

• 1:17:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:17:44Jocko Willink?

  And that's a freaking badass place to be. And so you say this in the book, "I was starting to experience real success, but privately, I floated in and out of despair. Every win was a relief from my depression, but every win was temporary. My life was an unsustainable formula. Fight and win to distract myself, take to take the edge off. When I couldn't compete, the edge still needed to go away somehow. In those times, my outlets became less healthy. I would go to parties, go to strip clubs, stay up all night, anything to keep me busy. It would have forced me to, if you would have forced me to sit on a couch with nothing but my own thoughts, I might have gone insane. Many people say they find themselves through martial arts. I was avoiding myself, my own private thoughts, my past.

• 1:18:27Jocko Willink?

  I needed every tournament to be the biggest one possible, the one that would require 100% of my focus and mental attention. Then I wouldn't need to spend time with myself. But I also recognized that the cycle would eventually end. I couldn't compete forever, couldn't train forever. My pain would never stop coming for me. It would catch up with me. I sometimes wondered if death was the solution.

• 1:18:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure. I wasn't, uh, I went back to that feeling of when I was a little boy, like who I had to become in order to survive wasn't someone that I really liked. And when you don't like your own self, uh, you get tired of living with yourself. So what do you do when you're tired of living with yourself? You stop living with yourself, you know? So I remember I was, uh, I just, I wanted, I didn't want to be here no more. You know, I went to the store. I got a a rope. I was gonna make a noose and I was gonna find a good tree to jump from and hang myself from. Uh, but I was too cowardly to do it, you know? Uh, that's what it comes down to. But ultimately, the cowardice became

• 1:19:38Speaker 01

  a problem because I didn't want anyone to find me. I said, well, man, what if a little kid finds me? And how's my mom gonna live? I almost wanted my father to feel that pain, you know, to feel the pain that that he made me feel, uh, so much, you know? Uh, but I didn't want my mom to feel that pain, so I got over that, you know, and I didn't end up killing myself. And I realized I can never, I can never do that because, you know, while I said I was too much of a coward to kill myself, I didn't want to be so much of a coward to not face myself, you know, there's, I would rather be the coward afraid to kill myself than the coward to run from myself, you know?

• 1:20:19Speaker 01

  So I really just, I started trying to find what would make me happy. Because winning wouldn't make me. I would be happy for like a day and then I needed more. And it's like, people ask me, what are some of the things you would have done differently? What I would have done is I would have learned to stay in the moment more and, and and celebrate my victories. And I, for me, if I was celebrating a victory, I wasn't working hard towards the next one. And as soon as I would win, I'd be on the mats the next day training to win the next one. Instead of being on the mats the next day training because I love jiu-jitsu. I spent a lot of time training to win rather than a lot of time training to just love it.

• 1:21:01Speaker 01

  Like, competition has to be a consequence of your love for jiu-jitsu. You can't compete to win. If you're only competing to win, well, why don't you go do something that's much easier on your body? Right? If it's just winning that you're addicted. You have to be addicted to jiu-jitsu, you know? And you have to show up because you love jiu-jitsu. So my athletes, I try to make it fun for them. And the consequence of their love for jiu-jitsu will be when they step out under the bright lights and they finally win.

• 1:21:33Speaker 01

  But I realized what really made me happy, what was teaching, you know? So I, and it genuinely made me happy, helping people. And it's something that never left me. It wasn't fleeting. You know, one thing about me, I made it to, I won three ADCC trials in North America. There's not many people in history that have done that. And I also lost three ADCCs. You know, and I'll go back when I was in Little League. I walked a lot, I struck out the last batter to get into the Little League World Series. And then I walked the last batter to lose the Little League World Series. And I always said to myself, man, if I just would have won an ADCC. Well, you know, okay, if you just would have won. But, did you win the absolute division? And then if you won the absolute division, did you win the super fight?

• 1:22:18Speaker 01

  Then if you won the super fight, did you win the super fight more than anyone else ever won the super fight? It's never enough. It's never enough. So, just accept the things that are, you know? And I think a lot of the reasons why I didn't win ADCC was my own

• 1:22:35Speaker 01

  mental shortcoming, to be quite honest.

• 1:22:39Speaker 01

  You know, throughout the years competing, I've given up 12 points in 18 years. I wouldn't give up position or things like that.

• 1:22:48Speaker 01

  But when it came to ADCC, I didn't find a way, right? And for me to be able to say that now and be okay with saying that, like, no, I wasn't Dean. Like Dean did what I couldn't do, and that's okay, man. I respect him for that. I love him for that. Good for you, brother. Tell me how it felt, you know? Tell me how it felt, like, because you find out who you are, and who I am, I like who I am. You know, so I said, what I, what made me happy was finding out where could I prosper the most? Where could I do best? And my best is, it's pretty good, you know, running a school, running an association. You know, I have sixty-four affiliates now. I never looked for an association, but every school that started associating under me,

• 1:23:32Speaker 01

  that actually, because I have some schools that associate with me, they don't listen to any advice. Ironically, they don't grow. The schools that do, they've all grown by at least thirty-five, forty percent. So that's something I'm proud about, you know? So I could sit next to somebody and hear where they flourished in life, and then maybe they could hear where I have. But at the end of the day, if you're not flourishing in a, in a sense of life that could actually keep you feeling good for an elongated period of time, what does it matter? So I could go back and be thankful now that I won the trials, but I can't live off that. You know, like, one of the reasons now, you know, over the last few months, I've leaned out a lot, right? Because I'm not competing now. So when I was still competing, I wouldn't mind if my weight would fluctuate here and there,

• 1:24:17Speaker 01

  because I'm still competing, I'm still kicking butt. It's okay if I get chubby here and there, right? But now that I'm not competing, I have to stay more disciplined to look the part, and, and to still, I don't want to say suffer, because eating well and staying fit is not suffering. But to remain disciplined in other aspects of life, so when I speak, people want to listen. People want to hear what I have to say, rather than being the guy that, you know, won the high school championship and want to talk about that, like, oh, when I won the trials in two thousand nine, fifteen and seventeen. You don't want to be Uncle Rico, right? From Napoleon Dynamite, just out there like, you know, I could have, Coach would have put me in, boy. That's it. And it's so easy to get caught up in that, and it's so easy. That's why I find a lot of MMA fighters, they never retire,

• 1:25:00Speaker 01

  because they're, they're searching for that moment again, right? To where, when I signed for One FC again, and I tore my bicep, I said, "God's trying to tell you something, brother." You know, I've never been knocked out in a fight. I've never been finished in a fight. And, uh... I don't really wanna be, to be quite honest, you know?

• 1:25:19Jocko Willink?

  Seems like a good call.

• 1:25:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't need to go out on this. My last fight was actually a great one. I knocked out a guy, Jason Lambert, and it was a walkaway knockout. And I got lucky, you know? It easily could have been me, but like, what are we searching for? Why are we trying to find something that's fleeting? Why are we trying to find something that doesn't last? We need to find things that last. What lasts is your impression that you make upon people. Well, what's gonna make my legacy last is my association, my students, my ability to help other people open a school and support their family. Who cares who won the trials in 2016? There's people who win the trials every two years. Could we name all of them? Of course not, you know?

• 1:26:05Speaker 01

  So I find serving, you know? Service, giving back to people is something that makes me happy. And I guess for my own selfish reasons, I like to say I'm good at it. I guess that's a competitor within me. But again, if you reach your own personal best, you're naturally gonna find greatness. Because most people, I truly don't, I believe most people in this world don't fight to find their best. I just truly believe they don't. Because I don't think they realize how much they're capable of doing. If they knew how much they could achieve, I think they would put in more work.

• 1:26:38Jocko Willink?

  Well, you obviously, you realize this at some point. I mean, not only, you know, in the book, you end up starting your own academy.

• 1:26:46Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:26:46Jocko Willink?

  And you talk about all this stuff. In four months, you have 150 students. You grow real quick from the first space that you had. You grow real quick. You get a bunch of students and you end up with 150 students in four months, which means you can quit your job. And now you're kinda like well on your way to making things happen. You got Gary Tonin shows up, start training with that maniac.

• 1:27:07Speaker 01

  Crazy guy, man. I remember the first day he walked in, he was a Hellion. He had long, ratty hair. He had severe ADHD like me. He couldn't look at me in the eyes. Every single thing I would teach-

• 1:27:19Jocko Willink?

  How old was he at the time?

• 1:27:20Speaker 01

  He was 15 or 16. I brought, Gary trained with me strictly until he was black belt. He won ADC's trials under me. He won the Noggy Worlds two times just with me. He went to ADC just under me. And then he started going to school at Rutgers in New Brunswick. And that was closer to the city. And then that's when he started training in the city with John. And I say to this day, and I mean this, if Gary just would have stayed with me- He undoubtedly would have probably won three ADCCs in boring fashion, right? John made him exciting, to where Gary always had that exciting style under me and I never wanted it. Like, he would, he would win a match like 72 to 47 and I'm like, "Bro, how do you give up 47 points?

• 1:28:05Speaker 01

  Like, what are you doing right now?" So, I didn't tell him "good job" for the first time until after he won the Brown Ball Worlds. The second time, I didn't give him his black belt after he won the Worlds the first time, because I didn't like the way he won, right? Damn. Yeah, so, he, he, uh, got, John allowed him to, to, I guess, be him. You know, and a great example of Gary is when ADCC 2017, the match for third place against Wagner Rocha, Gary was like, "I'm not competing in this to win, I'm competing in this to have fun." I said, "Gary, you're up for a medal, it's gonna be the first time you win an ADCC medal. Go win the medal, I don't care how boring it is, like, I'm having fun." He went out there and, and he was, Wagner took his back from behind and Gary, instead of defending, he put his arms up in the air like he was flying an airplane and started like running around the match.

• 1:28:50Speaker 01

  It's like, "What, what am I watching right now?" And he started doing, you know, uh, Grammys out of it. He ended up losing the match because he just had fun, he's like, "Hey, I had fun." So, that's him, that's his happiness. And I, it, it was hard for me to understand at the time, like, "If you're not winning, how are you happy?" Right? Like, I don't get it, right? So, yeah, Gary found his exciting, uh, legendary, exciting style under John, 100%. You know, John's a master with his submissions and, uh, Gary was able to flourish in that sense. I do believe positionally, Gary would have squeaked out three ADCCs in, in a nice boring fashion under me. Uh, but you know what? That wouldn't have made Gary happy.

• 1:29:33Speaker 01

  Gary won ADCC gold medal being boring, like Tom de Blas, he's not happy, you know?

• 1:29:40Jocko Willink?

  Going back to the book here, it felt like almost everyone I knew in my life was there. My mother and father, Henzo, all of their students, all of my students. It was around 100 people all gathered there for me. In your lifetime, you rarely get to experience moments where so many people are gathered just for you. Not because you're going to give them anything, but because they just want to be a part of your moment. Henzo, full of his usual charisma, gave a proud speech, totally off the cuff. As usual, he knew exactly what to say. With Henzo, his words always took a backseat to his spirit. Hell yeah. Ricardo spoke next. It was different from Henzo. He couldn't make you laugh on cue, but he didn't try and be something he wasn't.

• 1:30:24Jocko Willink?

  If Henzo was a happy warrior, Ricardo was the intense one. At that time, Ricardo was fighting in the UFC, winning fights and slowly climbing the ladder. He had assembled a legendary team, including guys like Frankie Edgar, who is now being seriously considered as a top contender for UFC title shot. At the end of their speeches, they both tied a black belt around my waist. People cheered, everyone wanted hugs and pictures. I felt happy, but as always, something held me back. 100 people had just gathered to see me succeed, people that cared about me and were happy for me. I went to bed that night in my new house that I had bought. I had a black belt, I was a brown belt champion, I had money, I had friends. But as crazy as it sounds, I felt incredibly lonely.

• 1:31:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, just a constant pit in my stomach, man. And that's something I've dealt with my entire life. And it was so frustrating because you don't know what is causing. It's like an impending doom, you know? And I think a lot of it stems back to when I was younger, when things would go well, I knew right around the corner was something devastating about to happen. So I think I would always worry about something that was gonna happen terrible, or I was always searching for something else to negate something terrible happening, rather than just staying in the moment. Like right now, when I got my black belt, hey, you got your black belt, you have your home. Everything is good, nothing else matters. The only thing that matters is right now. If you want a better tomorrow, you have to focus on today.

• 1:31:54Speaker 01

  That's the only way tomorrow, you can't worry about tomorrow, you can't worry about the past. You could learn from the past. I don't believe not thinking about the past. While staying in the moment, what I mean, when I say staying in the moment, I believe when we look at the past, we look at it from a very objective point of view to where I look at it at not from a personal standpoint. I look at it as like I'm reading a book or I'm looking through history and what could I learn from that? What did I do well? What did I, what do I need to improve upon? When I think about the future, I can't get lost in it. I could kind of think about where I want my future to be. Okay, so now what do I need to do in the present moment in order to achieve what I need in the future?

• 1:32:35Speaker 01

  And I think for me, I didn't know what I wanted because I didn't know what found me happiness. I didn't know what my happy place was. So I won some cool competitions, you know, but it was never enough. But I still didn't win ADCC. So in my mind, I'm like, all right, well, maybe I just need to win ADCC to be happy. No, that's not it. That's not it. You know, it's never enough. And that's what I found was never enough. And that's that, that mentality of never rest, you know? Always do more. And you should never rest. You should always do more. But that doesn't mean that you can't be happy with what you're doing at the given time, you know? And for me, when I realized, all right, what is success to you?

• 1:33:19Speaker 01

  All that success is happy to happiness, right? My, my success is feeling happy. Okay. Well, how do you find that? You have to find out what makes you happy. What made me happy was serving. So the more I realized that, I would start, I would, I would find glimpses of current. You know, I, I remember I had a time, one time when I was younger, I was in my mother's living room and the breeze was perfect. It was the perfect temperature.

• 1:33:46Speaker 01

  I wasn't jumping out of my skin. A lot of times I can't rest. Like I always feel like jumpy. I was completely relaxed. I wasn't cold, I wasn't hot. It was the perfect moment. To me, that was heaven. Right? That was heaven right there. And I wasn't thinking about anything besides the breeze on my face. The current temperature, which was perfect, and my current state of relaxation. You know, and to me, I was like, well, at this moment, I'm very successful. No one knows what's happening, but no one needs to know what's happening because I know what's happening. Right? And I think when you first reach a little bit of fame in your sport and you realize

• 1:34:25Speaker 01

  how mean people could be, it's uh, it's also a slap in the face because no matter what you do, people aren't, it's not good enough. People always have something to say. People always want to bring you down. So when you're that's the confusion. You're living to serve people, right? Well, serving people and helping people makes me happy. But the same people I'm trying to help and serve have negative things to say here and there. How could you truly find happiness? Well, the key was for me, serving people the best way I can, being thankful that I served them and understanding how they feel with me serving them is their own personal choice. I could only do my best.

• 1:35:07Speaker 01

  If it's not good enough for you, I don't know what to tell you because a lot of people that you serve over and over and over again, the first moment you don't give them exactly what they want, they forget every great thing you've ever done for them. You know, and that's what they look at. So it's like, you know what, man? I could only do what I could do. You know, and that's my best. And I could take my past experiences, like the reason why I feel I'm a great coach right now is not my, my victories, but it's my defeats. You know, you know what your students shouldn't do through your past failures. So when I started realizing as well, I could serve people better by all my failures.

• 1:35:51Speaker 01

  The things that would break my heart in the past were actually a blessing. Without these failures, how would I serve other people? How would I know how to avoid the failures if I've never felt them? So I started to learn more and more that you know, success is fleeting if you look at success as victories, because there's no such thing as victories that last forever. Every great champion eventually falls, right? But

• 1:36:18Speaker 01

  What makes you happy?

• 1:36:21Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and that's what you're chasing and it's it's pretty clear in the book and you you mentioned it, you know, so you you win the trials. You go and do ADCC, you end up losing on like a mistake, a freaking clerical mistake, which is ridiculous.

• 1:36:33Speaker 01

  Oh, man.

• 1:36:34Jocko Willink?

  Uh, which then gets you in the mindset of like, alright, well, if I can punch people, we won't have any clerical mistakes, we'll have knocked out teeth and victories. You end up going back to MMA, you end up doing, uh, ring of combat. Uh, you fight three times in, what was it, in the first year? And then the next year, so now we're into 2011, you fight three more times and you're basically just crushing people, which is, I mean, at this point, we the level that you're at, the school that you're at, the training that you're doing, like, y- y- you're in a lower league, you know, ring of combat at the time, you're you're above them.

• 1:37:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:37:10Jocko Willink?

  And it's it's it's proven out. Um, you say by the end of 2011, I was offered a light heavyweight title fight against Mike Stewart, I overwhelmed him the first round TKO victory.

• 1:37:21Jocko Willink?

  Then you get a title defense against a guy named David, what is it?

• 1:37:24Speaker 01

  Teixeira.

• 1:37:25Jocko Willink?

  Teixeira.

• 1:37:26Speaker 01

  Oh, man, he was a scary guy, man.

• 1:37:28Jocko Willink?

  And, um,

• 1:37:30Speaker 01

  there's a funny story about him.

• 1:37:33Jocko Willink?

  You you have this fight midway through the second round, you feel his energy change. He was getting tired and you basically go through this fight and you you win.

• 1:37:44Speaker 01

  Um, the funny thing is going into that fight, I looked him up and it's a highlight video of like this crazy Russian music, he's from the Republic of Georgia. And he's just suplexing everybody. And then I see, oh, David Teixeira lifting weights, he has a 54 pound plate. He lifts it from, it took him like 13 minutes from the floor to the sky, pressing over his head. He did it 250 times, right? I was like, whatever, I'll do this right now. So I went and I got a 45 pound plate and I'm like, I'll do this right now. I got to like 27 and I was like, oh, my God, this guy's gonna kill me. I can't do this, but I was like, you know what? Lifting weights is not the same. He was the strongest man I've I've ever faced.

• 1:38:27Speaker 01

  But again, as we were just speaking about before, there's a lot more to martial arts and to fighting than just strength. But uh, he didn't suplex me, so that was a victory within itself.

• 1:38:39Jocko Willink?

  I mean, that's what you do talk about that in the book, like you're getting ready for the fight and you know, and you're sort of from a coaching perspective, from a strategic perspective, you're always like, okay. You know, if the person's a better grappler, you keep them on the feet. If they're better on the feet, you take them to the ground. If they're better jiu-jitsu, you know, you have this plan, kind of a general plan that you're going to use as a fighter. But then you're like seeing his wrestling is real good, his submission is real good, his striking is really good. You're kind of like, damn. But it's, that is kind of crazy. He was that kind of level of conditioning and you, you broke him.

• 1:39:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, and he never felt stronger to me in the cage, actually. Uh, I never felt his strength in the cage. I just think I had more leverage and more smarts. And I think a huge aspect in martial arts and fighting and jiu-jitsu is reaction time, right? So I, I think timing is a huge difference between average and great and great and excellent. A lot of times people know the technique, but they don't understand the timing. And I explained it to people who have never wrestled before. Finding that perfect time to shoot, to take that double, it's almost impossible, right? And a lot of times you don't have the experience. You see the shot, but you don't realize when you see the shot, that's when you have to shoot.

• 1:39:51Speaker 01

  You can't see the shot and then think about it. Uh, so I, my timing was just better than his, you know, he hesitated a little bit and you know, hesitation is death. You can't. And that takes time and experience, but yeah, I was, I got lucky, man. I got lucky with that. You know, he also traveled from across the world. Fighting out of his country is not easy, but yeah, he was a strong guy. He was more strong than he was technical and you can't be that. Because at the highest level, everybody's strong. You're freaks of nature.

• 1:40:21Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and it's, it's amazing, you know, you take someone that even though someone that can has this incredible aerobic and anaerobic conditioning to be able to do whatever was 250 cleaning jerks with a 50 pound plate. So he's got that level. You do 27 and you're already hurting, but the technique and the, and the being able to relax in the cage. And not be tense and not be like, that's another huge piece.

• 1:40:46Speaker 01

  And what makes people tense is fainting. And I always faint a lot, like feints make people. Jump. Every time people jump, people get tired. It's like try to squeeze your hands together as hard as you could, see how long you could do it. Eventually, you're gonna get tired, you know, so. Um, you know, being strategic in that approach and being efficient, efficiency is huge. And I don't think he knew efficiency. Efficiency, he went a hundred percent, a thousand miles per hour. But the thing is like, you know, I hate to bring back, uh, we watched Bloodsport, you know, when he said brick, brick no hit back, you know? The two hundred and fifty pound plate didn't hit back, you know? When, when you add that involved, it gets a little tricky. That's what a lot of these guys don't understand. Like, these strong guys have no idea.

• 1:41:31Speaker 01

  And you think this day and age, they would get the hint, but there's still guys out there that don't train and they still just don't get it. They don't realize their strength is, it's cool, it's cool to be strong.

• 1:41:40Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, be strong, for sure.

• 1:41:41Speaker 01

  God bless you. But don't mix. Don't be confused.

• 1:41:45Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, don't, don't, don't let that get to your head a little bit.

• 1:41:49Speaker 01

  It's the same thing with jujitsu guys and, you know, we have to also understand like, and, and, and here's, here the problem is, like, a lot of guys who don't train, who have weapons, well, you know, my, my, my gun will do it, you know? Yeah, I, I get that, right? But jujitsu guys also need to understand that in different scenarios, your jujitsu will only get you so far.

• 1:42:12Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, like getting punched in the freaking head.

• 1:42:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:42:14Jocko Willink?

  Like, you know, like,

• 1:42:16Speaker 01

  And then after getting punched in your head, you know, uh, if I have a knife in my hand, that's also an issue, right? Like, uh, you know, that's why I, I see, you know, I could equate this, like, I see it, a lot of, uh, people get annoyed when jujitsu guys or fighters said, you know, it was a war. Or a lot of jujitsu guys, and they call their jujitsu match a fight. So here's my thing. No, I don't believe a jujitsu match is a fight. If you wanna say it, I don't really care.

• 1:42:39Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:40Speaker 01

  I've been punched in my face. There's a huge difference between getting punched in my face and a jujitsu match. And at the same time, uh, no, I'm not dodging bullets in an MMA fight, right? But I think MMA fighting, like, when you look at the, the heart and the, and the, well, you look at Frankie Edgar's fights, right? You can't tell me that you couldn't put him in a life and death situation and he wouldn't fight with heart and honor, right? Because,

• 1:43:05Jocko Willink?

  That's affirmative.

• 1:43:06Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly. You know, so that's how I look at that.

• 1:43:09Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's wild too. Um, you know, going back, you go back to like the, the nineties, the late nineties and the early two thousands. I would watch the UFC I was training, like I was training hard a lot. And you could watch it back then and be like, dude, I could actually take this guy in the UFC. And be like, oh, yeah, I could take this guy.

• 1:43:32Speaker 01

  Hundred percent.

• 1:43:32Jocko Willink?

  And then, and then I, you know, I got to train with those guys and I'd be like, oh yeah, I can take these guys. Like I would train with guys that were in the UFC and be, and know that I could beat them. It's not like that anymore.

• 1:43:42Speaker 01

  It's not.

• 1:43:43Jocko Willink?

  It's not like that anymore, bro. It's not. These guys that are, these guys that are, and you know, it, it, it went that way pretty quick. Like as soon, I mean, I would say, you know, by the time this is what, two thousand four, two thousand five, you're starting to get real. Like these guys are, there's no holes in their games anymore. It's like what you were saying about, hey, maybe the guy's not good at striking. Cool. I can stay on the feet or the guy's not good at grappling. I'll take him down. There's nobody like that in the UFC.

• 1:44:07Speaker 01

  And even the guys who are like blue belts in jiu jitsu, they're black belts about how, how to avoid submission and how to avoid jiu jitsu.

• 1:44:14Jocko Willink?

  Yes.

• 1:44:15Speaker 01

  Jiu jitsu is so hard to use in a five minute match when you're slipping. So that's why I never went for takedowns in my MMA fight. Cause if you go for a takedown and you miss it, it's just exhausting. Then taking somebody down and then they stand up again, that's even more exhausting. It's like, what am I doing right now? Man, these guys are good now. I'm so conditioned.

• 1:44:31Jocko Willink?

  Oh dude, they're savage.

• 1:44:32Speaker 01

  It's literally insane.

• 1:44:33Jocko Willink?

  It's freaking awesome. Uh, what was the deal? So you write about it in the book, but talk us through this, uh, situation that happened with David's dad. Like after the fight.

• 1:44:43Speaker 01

  So it was actually, it was his instructor.

• 1:44:47Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 1:44:47Speaker 01

  Uh, he was in the special forces for the, the Georgian military. And, uh, man, he gave me his dog tags and he just said, you know, you fought with like such heart and such honor and you respected me and you respected David so much like, you know, I want you to have this and, uh,

• 1:45:07Speaker 01

  It touched me so much, you know, I still, I keep in touch with his daughter here and there, like, once in a blue moon, uh, years down the line, but yeah, for him to give me his dog tags after I beat his fighter, but, you know, it also showed me like, the mentality of people from different countries, you know, that, you know, it, honor means so much to them. Nowadays, it's crazy when you look at these Russian promotions, every single way in, there's a fistfight and stuff, I don't know what's going on over there, but like, uh, you know, I think the fact that like, um, you know, when I won, I didn't cheer too much, and I raised his hand, and I was, I was very thankful that he flew from the Republic of Georgia to give me the opportunity to win, because without him, I couldn't have this big fight, and he was a champion over there, and, uh, he, you know, he was big over there, like,

• 1:45:52Speaker 01

  he was, when he would land, like, from wherever he was flying from, they would greet him at the airport and everything, he was a superstar, you know, so I also understood, every time I won, I understood somebody lost, so I know David had to go home, uh, losing, and in that culture, that could be really, because all they have, in a lot of other countries, is their victory or defeat, you know, you're really only as good as your last fight, so I, I, you know, I had a lot of compassion and, and thankfulness for him, and I think his coach just saw that, and, uh, you know, he, I saw that dog tag, I'll never lose it, man, you know, it was incredible, it was crazy.

• 1:46:28Jocko Willink?

  Um, I'll fast forward a little bit here, uh, so now you're, you're, you're the champion of that organization, and all of a sudden, um, you're sitting by the pool one day, and you get a call, um, go to the book here, Tommy, did you hear me? I snap out of my thoughts to realize Ali never stopped talking, uh, yeah, just say it again, I'm saying it has to be tonight, I need to call them back with a yes or no to this, you don't keep this guy waiting, listen, tell him I'm on vacation, and the belt's not going anywhere for a few weeks, so they can, the belt? No, Tommy, this isn't, this isn't ROC I'm talking about here, we're talking about the big show, I lean up in my chair, chair, the ice packs slide off my foot, because you had an injured foot at the time, and falls to the ground practically sizzling when it hits

• 1:47:11Jocko Willink?

  the hot surface, wait, what, you're not talking about Ring of Combat? Tommy, listen again, Joe Silva expects a call back in the next hour, if you say yes, I gotta get you on a flight back home and get you back to the gym, my head is spinning now, so, the UFC, that Joe Silva? Yes, that's the only Joe Silva, the UFC matchmaker.

• 1:47:35Jocko Willink?

  And what's the match? Sorrel de Bate, am I saying that right?

• 1:47:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, Sorrel.

• 1:47:39Jocko Willink?

  Sorrel de Bate. I know his name, I know the name but only vaguely. Striker, European of some sort. It's finally happening. I look at my ankle, more determined than ever to heal it. Even if the UFC wants me in a month, I can make it work. Tom, there's more, he says, and it's not good. They need you in Sweden. Sweden? That card is in three weeks. Tommy, it's in 12 days. I take a long pause, understanding that I am ultimately going to say yes. Ali knows this too, but maybe for a brief moment, he thinks I might say no. Tommy, this is it. Behind that sentence are 100 unsaid implications. When the UFC calls, you say yes.

• 1:48:23Jocko Willink?

  If you don't, they go to the next name on the list and your name may not come up next time. At this level, MMA was filled with divas that would play 100 mind games to get a better fight, on a better card, for more money. I wasn't one of those divas, but no one knew that about me yet. They didn't know whether I was injured or just looking for a way out or of a short notice fight. 100 men would fill my spot without a second thought if my manager didn't pick up that phone and say yes within the hour. Okay, Ali, call him back and tell him to get me the contract. Beautiful, beautiful. That's the right call, Tommy, the right call. How soon can you be in my office? I'll have the contract ready for you. Just fax it to the gym. I'm going straight.

• 1:49:05Jocko Willink?

  In mid-sentence, I felt the sharp pain as I stand up on my lounge chair and put my weight on my ankle. I take a sharp breath. 12 days. Hey, you okay, Tommy? You cut out there. Just fax me the contract.

• 1:49:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was a rough one because I was supposed to have a ring and combat title fight the next month, but I fractured my ankle. I threw a kick and I hit somebody's elbow. Not my ankle, my foot. And I broke the top of my foot, like the little bones. And I was having trouble walking and I was like fat, out of shape. I was drinking wine.

• 1:49:42Speaker 01

  And I accepted this fight and they flew me out on Wednesday. I fought on Saturday and I had a training partner who thought he was 6'4". So, Suriel Diabate is 6'6". And so I trained with this guy so much, but he was like, his frame was small, uh, and he was not 6'4". I thought he was, you know. Cause you thought you were 6'0". So, when I got to Sweden and I saw Suriel, I was like. Is this a 185? This is a 205. Okay. He looked like an NBA player. I was like, my God. Dude, 6'6" is huge. He was enormous, you know, a world-class kickboxer. And

• 1:50:23Speaker 01

  man, like, I just, I had no confidence because preparation builds confidence. And I didn't have preparation. I don't like doing things if I'm not prepared. I'm not one of those guys that call me anytime and I'll fight. That was never me. I'll never be that guy. Because I think what happens a lot of times with that is people call you to lose, you know, and even if you put in an exciting show,

• 1:50:44Speaker 01

  you're still a winner. There's a lot of guys who could lose exciting and still feel good. My mental health wasn't that. If I lost, I didn't feel good. I didn't know how to lose and I never lost in MMA yet. And man, the fight was going good until it wasn't. You know, I won the first round and the second round, I remember, you know,

• 1:51:07Speaker 01

  I took him down. I was in side control and my corner was still like screaming for me to get better position. To where I think it's very important when you're a corner to, and it depends who you're going with, like, I like to stay, remain calm in the corner for as much as possible. But I started getting like, I started freaking out, you know, and I already had side control. Generally, they don't speak you up, stand you up from side control. But then like halfway during the round, he like stood up. I know I ended up on the bottom. There was one shot he hit me with, with an elbow. My head was against the canvas, so it had no room. So I kinda got my head smashed in between his elbow and the canvas, and he had a very large elbow. And then he ended up winning a majority decision. It was a tough fight. It was a scrap.

• 1:51:53Speaker 01

  Uh, one of the judges gave it to me. I don't think he should have, to be quite honest, because I didn't really do. I took him down. I positionally dominated him. I got like three takedowns around the fight. I passed his guard. But ultimately, I didn't do any damage, and he did a lot of damage to me. He uh, he, he, he, he hit me in the head a good few times. He can cuss me very well. And that was, that was a learning experience, man, because going into that, I was one of the top prospects in the world, and everybody was such a Tom fan. And then as soon as I lost, it's like people forgot that I took the fight on a week's notice, that I was clearly out of shape. The weighing pictures, God, if you're listening, just go look at the weighing pictures. They're embarrassing as hell. I'm like a soft little chubby doughboy.

• 1:52:35Speaker 01

  You know, and they don't care. You know, they think that if you take the fight, you should win. People don't understand, like, there's a lot that goes into preparation. I wasn't able to prepare, so I took the fight on short notice. And people ultimately were, they were just terrible. They were, they were just like ripping me apart. Oh, you got tired. Yeah, I got tired. You know what I mean? Like, what do you think, man? Like, come on, give me a break here.

• 1:52:56Jocko Willink?

  I, I definitely noticed in the book, man, and even what you've been saying today, like, and you write about it. Like, that shit gets to you. Like, people talking smack about you bothers you.

• 1:53:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, it used to.

• 1:53:07Jocko Willink?

  He echoes laughing because I, that stuff, people say stuff about, you know, whatever, read my comments, whatever, like, you know. I think Rogan has the best advice when it comes to this stuff. He's like, just don't read the comments.

• 1:53:16Speaker 01

  Post them ghosts.

• 1:53:17Jocko Willink?

  You'll hear him say like, somebody that's kinda like coming into the world, he'll be like, no, don't, don't, don't read the comments. You know, he's really, he's really like serious about that. And I can tell you, like, I read comments. I, I don't, they don't, they don't make me feel anything, you know. I don't get mad or anything. And maybe it's because I'm not, you know, this is very, this is more personal than, I guess, maybe what someone might say about me. Well, you definitely take it more personally. Uh, you're, you're in a fight, and you lost, and like, this is your career, and people are talking smack about you, and you don't like it.

• 1:53:46Speaker 01

  I wasn't ready for it. I wasn't ready. And like, and I remember talking to Rashad Evans, and he's like, you know, one day we're doing autographs, and somebody walked up to me, and they handed me. A picture of me being knocked out by Loyota Machida, the sign, you know?

• 1:54:00Jocko Willink?

  Damn dude.

• 1:54:01Speaker 01

  And I just wasn't ready. Yeah, I wasn't ready for it at that time. That's the thing that these young athletes got to understand. I try to make things very uncomfortable for them in the training room, right? Because when you get out there, it's not just competing. It's like you gotta handle the bright lights. You gotta handle. And when I say bright lights, it's the pressure, it's the trash talk, it's the people who will never do it that like to talk trash, you know? You can't let that stuff faze you. It gotta roll off you. Now I'm to a point I really don't care. It doesn't make a difference to me. I realized I don't care when my dad died and somebody made like a little cartoon, right? And it was like the Simpson characters and one of the Simpson characters was throwing a frisbee. And there was no one catching the frisbee and the caption said, Tom playing frisbee with his dad. And I actually.

• 1:54:47Jocko Willink?

  Where, where did you see this?

• 1:54:49Speaker 01

  They, I got tagged in Instagram and they were like a burner account, you know? And I actually, I giggled a little bit. I was like, you know what, man? You can't win with these people. So it, it's like, I don't care anymore, but at the time I did care and, and at the time it affected me. It affected my mental health and you gotta understand, you, you can't care if you're gonna be in any kind of limelight whatsoever, you just can't. Cause there's no rules. When you're in the, when you're in the limelight, like people forget all about mental health. People are like, oh, don't bully this and that mental health. Like, no, like any kind of like, anybody popular in their field, people are ruthless to them. They don't care what they say. They think, they, they look at these people almost as if they're not people, you know? They're not human beings.

• 1:55:33Jocko Willink?

  I'll tell you, one time, I forget what I posted about, but I think I posted about a podcast or something. One of the podcasts and someone put in the comments, they, about Echo Charles. And they were like, just the most degrading comment about Echo Charles. And it was like, hey, who is this Echo Charles guy and why is he on here? Everything he says is stupid. No one wants to hear from him. Why is he on this podcast? Jocko, you shouldn't have him on and just talk yourself and leave the Echo guy out, cause no one likes him. It was something like that. And Echo responded.

• 1:56:18Jocko Willink?

  He, I saw, I was pretty, pretty, pretty harsh. And then I see a comment from Echo and it says, honestly, that's a fair assessment. And I was like, that is the best response. It really is, man.

• 1:56:31Speaker 01

  You can't go back.

• 1:56:32Jocko Willink?

  And you know what I've, I talked about on a podcast is like, when something bothers you, there's, it's bothering you because there's some kind of truth in it. And you know, it's like, yeah, Echo is, is going to say some stuff on the podcast and to like people, there's going to be some people that don't like it. And he says some dumb shit too, by the way.

• 1:56:51Speaker 01

  No doubt about it.

• 1:56:52Jocko Willink?

  And so when someone says, hey, what, it's like someone will say about me like, oh, Jocko's freaking all dramatic about this. Like, yeah, well, I do get a little bit dramatic about some shit. You know what I mean? Like this is like, yeah, it's true. Jocko's a knuckle dragger. Yeah, I'm kind of an uncle dragger. Jocko's freaking nationalistic patriot guy that just freak, well, yeah, I kind of am. I can get a little bit blinded by, you know, patriotism. Like, it's all true. Like, these things are true. If you let them, so when something really bothers me, it's like, oh, that's because there's some level of truth in it. And the best thing for me to do is be like, yeah, that's a good point. And it's the same thing you did. Yeah, that's a good point. Because there's been times where I've been talking about being on the Baton Death March and reading from a book of a guy that was on the Baton Death March and what he suffered through.

• 1:57:35Jocko Willink?

  And Echo's chimed in that like, one time he had to walk from the grocery store to his car and the door wasn't open and he had like a lot of bags with him. And so you gotta be like, yeah, you know, dude, you can't really do that, bro. You know, so everyone's got their Vietnam.

• 1:57:48Speaker 01

  Everyone's got their Vietnam. You know what it is for me, though? There's actually something not too long ago that I read. They were just hating on me. They were hating on you. They were hating on Goggins. They were hating on a bunch of people. And what, what gets me is people who have never accomplished anything, right? Or you being a man, like being a grown man, how could you get behind a fake screen name? Talk negative to another man, go home and look at your woman in the eyes, right? Like, I don't get it. It for me, but what I realized, I gotta stop trying to figure people out. Cause you can't figure them out. So for me, like a lot of people, you know, they think it's so corny, these inspirational things.

• 1:58:28Speaker 01

  I mean, I only think people who think the inspirational things are corny are the ones who have never suffered. Right? Like they'll never on like, they've never been where you've been, you know, like the reason why you don't really care about what comments say, because how many times have you been in life and death situations where like your comment is gonna bother me? You know, like you've been in some real stuff. Uh, and that's what I started thinking like, you know, I, you, you just can't change certain people. And what I also realized a lot of the hate that I've gotten over the years, uh, a lot of people who say negative things on my, my posts, right? I'll go to their page and I'll click on their messages.

• 1:59:09Speaker 01

  There are guys who used to message me that I never responded to and they get their feelings hurt. I'm sorry that I can't respond to every message, you know what I mean? But a lot of these people who hate, they're just people. Yeah, sometimes they say things that are true, but they're also sometimes people that are just very unhappy. And we remind them sometimes of everything that they're not, right? So instead of looking, when I look at, there, there's a story, there's this guy walks by a house, he looks at the home, it's like a mansion and he looks at the home and he says, wow, good, whoever is living here, good for them. They must've worked really hard to get there, like God bless them. And then the other person walks by and they look at the house like, God, he probably had this given to him. His family comes from money, he must be doing something illegal.

• 1:59:54Speaker 01

  Which type of person are you gonna be, you know? And I'm the type of person, when I look at somebody, I might not agree with everything that somebody says, but I, I try to learn if I can. And I just feel there's a, there's a lot of people who get behind a fake screen name and talk and it's like, for what? I would never comment on another dude's post for no reason, behind the fake screen name, talking trash, you know? And it's just, it's just so odd to me.

• 2:00:21Jocko Willink?

  It's, it's odd and it's also like completely common. I mean, that's what the, that's what they do. Yeah. So you can't get too hyped about that kind of stuff.

• 2:00:29Speaker 01

  You can't, it'll drive you insane.

• 2:00:30Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. You gotta just kinda let that stuff kinda roll. You know what I just, I, I wanted to, uh, so when you were training with Ricardo Alameda. And you were part of that school. So my buddy Seth Stone had got, he went to Princeton. So he's in the SEAL teams with me. He worked with me and then he went to Princeton and while he trained with me. And he trained with me from like 2005. So now it's like, I think it might've been like 2010 maybe. But he's been training me the whole time. I never give him any belt because you know, like you're not getting a belt from me. I'm like, I guess I'm kind of like you. If you're not giving Gary Tony his belt after he wins freaking worlds.

• 2:01:11Jocko Willink?

  So he goes out to Ricardo, it goes to Princeton and he's at Princeton. He goes like, hey, where should I train? I'm like, send me Google Earth, like show me the map, like who, what's there? See Ricardo Alameda, like go, go train with there, there. So he starts training there. And after like a year, he's like, he's like giving me reports. He's not saying anything, but he's just like, yeah, I'm doing good. I, I'm like getting some blue belts and like, I'm having good rolls. And I'm like, dude, this, this guy needs to get his blue belt. Like this is not cool. And I wrote a letter and I sent my blue belt, my own personal blue belt from when I was a blue belt. And I sent a letter to Ricardo Alameda. And I said, hey, I want to tell you about this guy's past. And I kind of talked about how he was in combat.

• 2:01:55Jocko Willink?

  And we were training the whole time and he was traveling and like, I never promoted him. And, but I'd said like, if you think he's ready, this is my blue belt that I would like him to have. And, uh, and he, and Ricardo gave him his blue belt and he read like that letter to the class.

• 2:02:13Speaker 01

  How incredible.

• 2:02:13Jocko Willink?

  It was freaking legit.

• 2:02:15Speaker 01

  That's incredible.

• 2:02:16Jocko Willink?

  But you know, that's one of those things where like the, when I saw Alameda, like a year later at some event or something like, it was pretty, pretty legit. Just like the connection between that.

• 2:02:28Speaker 01

  He's such a smart guy, Ricardo. Like he's much different than your typical, uh, Brazilian coach that you would think about. He's a very educated guy. He actually was accepted into one of the the most prestigious schools in Brazil to go to college and he didn't do it and he chose jiu-jitsu instead. Very educated guy.

• 2:02:50Speaker 01

  You could say, how is he so educated and chose jiu-jitsu instead?

• 2:02:54Speaker 01

  But he's such a stoic man, you know, like I it's good because I had him and I had Henzo, right?

• 2:02:58Jocko Willink?

  Oh, my gosh, that's chalk.

• 2:03:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I'm kind of like mixing.

• 2:03:02Jocko Willink?

  What is it, yin and yang?

• 2:03:03Speaker 01

  That's why a lot of people with me will be like, oh, you know, like, Tom is very contradicting. Well, no, I am because there's more than one side of me, you know, there's a time where I'm serious and, you know, more stoic and then there's a time where I like to joke around and there's a time where I feel people need a hug and a time where I feel people need to be smashed, right? Like, not everything is the same. Every situation requires a different me. Gotta have, you gotta wear many different hats. It doesn't mean you're fake. It means you're able to be a chameleon and you have to be in order to make it.

• 2:03:37Jocko Willink?

  Going back onto what's happened in your life at this time. So you get done with that first fight, short notice, and now you get another fight. And this next fight is gonna be in China.

• 2:03:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, thanks, guys. Thanks so much.

• 2:03:49Jocko Willink?

  How much time did they give you between those two fights?

• 2:03:51Speaker 01

  Uh, like, two months, I think.

• 2:03:52Jocko Willink?

  Oh, damn.

• 2:03:53Speaker 01

  Like, I wasn't ready. Like, I had, I was severely concussed.

• 2:03:56Jocko Willink?

  And now you're going down to 185, too?

• 2:03:58Speaker 01

  185. And man, like, I was in Macau, so I had to take a 17-hour flight, then a three-hour ferry ride, then an hour taxi ride. And I fought Riki Fukuda, who at the time, he was like 24 victories and seven losses or something like that. Uh, tons of experience, and this was gonna be my seventh or eighth fight. Uh, it was a scrap, man. It was a war. It was a good, well, I don't want to say war, sorry. It was a good fight. It was a, it was a scrap, uh, but it was very competitive, but he ended up getting the decision, the majority decision again. And, uh, I was like, you know what MMA is stupid. So stupid. It's for immature people. I don't want to do this and waste my time. So.

• 2:04:43Speaker 01

  I, I was like, I'm done. I told Joe Silva. A lot of people are mistaken about how that went. I didn't officially get cut by the UFC. I, I quit. I, I didn't want to do it anymore. And, uh, Joe was cool. He's like, I, I understand.

• 2:04:56Jocko Willink?

  Did he not say like, hey, bro, we gave you like some pretty rough fights out of the gate?

• 2:05:00Speaker 01

  That's just, I, I don't know if he hated me or what. Like, it was very odd that the way it happened. But you know what, though, man? I'm thankful it did happen because when I came up Glover Teixeira got signed at the same time, right? If I would have won my first fight, a hundred percent, my second match would have been against Glover. And I'm gonna be honest with you right now. He's a huge two oh fiver. I was a small two oh fiver.

• 2:05:29Speaker 01

  And when Glover hits you, your face breaks, you know? And I don't think at that time, I didn't have, he, he had, Glover had a ton of experience. Like, he fought for years and years and years for getting to the UFC. I didn't have much experience. I fought for like a year and a half, then I got to the UFC. I wasn't ready. Like, I was, I was better than like the local shows, but I wasn't quite ready for the big show. You know, my timing was off.

• 2:05:51Speaker 01

  And, you know, I lost two tough fights and that was what it was. But then Bellator was fighting in New Jersey. And, uh,

• 2:06:01Speaker 01

  Richard Chu reached out to my man. I, I, I stopped working with Ali and I started working with Danny Lagoria again. Well, he thought I was still working with Danny Lagoria. I wasn't working with Danny Lagoria yet.

• 2:06:12Speaker 01

  And, uh, he called. So then I called Joe Silva. I said, listen, Bellator wants me to fight. Would I be able to? Fight for them? He says, yeah, you know, I think you need some more experience anyway. So that's, that's a good thing. So I signed with Bellator and, uh, you know, I ended up fighting two times with Bellator, two victories. Uh, it's funny experience to talk about. My first fight in Bellator, the first round. I never lost a round on my feet until this first round. This kid was a Golden Gloves boxer, long lanky dude, Carlos Brooks.

• 2:06:42Speaker 01

  He was chipping me up, man. And he was getting so confident. He was doing like the Ali shuffle and everything. I went back after the second and I kept trying to take him down against the cage. You know, that was a whole game plan and I, I just wasn't able to do it. He clearly prepared for that.

• 2:07:01Speaker 01

  So since I lost those other two fights and I had that experience, I truly believe if I didn't lose those two fights, I would have lost this one. I went back in between rounds and it's like, it sounds kind of silly, but I was, I said to myself like, there's no way I'm gonna lose this fight. I just can't. I can't lose. You gotta find a way. And I ended up taking him down, open cage. I didn't go against the cage, you know? What do they say? Craziness is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. I was crazy the whole first round and I didn't succeed. So against the cage, he had no balance. I mean, in the middle of the cage, he had no balance. I took him down with a single and I ended up breaking his orbital. I hit him with an overhand and he was done.

• 2:07:44Speaker 01

  And then I had one more fight against Lambert and that, my fight against Lambert, my daughter didn't want me to fight. She was like, daddy, don't fight. And it started, it was like bothering me a little bit, you know? I don't know why it was bothering me. Too sensitive. But it bothered me a little bit and I ended up knocking him out the first round. You can see that fight. If you type in Tom the Blasser is Jason Lambert, as soon as I knock him out, I immediately go down and I like check on him and I hug him and-

• 2:08:09Jocko Willink?

  Dude, I read that in the book and I was like, really? Honestly, I was like, I read that in the book and I was like, cause it's, it's written in the book like, oh, you know, I felt like maybe this guy has a kid and I was like, well, he has won the freaking belt. So come on. I was like, he's exaggerating in the book. Like we're gonna see a little, like a little bit. Sure enough, man. You knock him, you knock him out, you knock him down and then he gets back up a little bit and then you, you knock him down with one shot and as soon as he's down, like you, you take like one step back and look at him and then you like legitimately, I was like, damn, this is exactly what you wrote in the book. Is exactly what happened. It was, it was, it's probably the most, for lack of a better word,

• 2:08:53Jocko Willink?

  abnormal end to a fight that I've ever seen.

• 2:08:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:08:58Jocko Willink?

  You gotta go watch it. Go watch it. It's like, you can tell there's a lot going on. For you to be in a fight, anyone, anyone in the world to be in a fight and you knock a dude out-

• 2:09:05Speaker 01

  And then shut it off right away.

• 2:09:06Jocko Willink?

  And just be like, I'm, I'm not even happy about this.

• 2:09:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:09:10Jocko Willink?

  That's exactly what it looks like. It was- It's it's very strange to see.

• 2:09:15Speaker 01

  It was strange, you know, and I remember Frankie Ayer calling me afterwards like he's like you. You're such a bull crap or that's crap. You didn't mean that. He's like, you did it all for sure. Like, how could you possibly do that for show in that moment? You can't. But I remember he was his wife. I remember he was talking about his wife and his daughter. And I was, you know, I don't believe my mentality for MMA was right at the time, you know, it affected me. I remember when I knocked him out, what came to my mind immediately was, I don't know how it flashed in my mind. Was if I was the one to get knocked out and my daughter saw that, how would she feel? Uh, so I felt bad immediately. And then I also realized like, man, if you're feeling bad when you knock people out, maybe you shouldn't be fighting.

• 2:09:55Speaker 01

  You know, like you can't feel bad. Uh, and then I had a match lined up against King Mo.

• 2:10:01Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:02Speaker 01

  But I hurt my knee two times and I was like, you know what, man? There's a great story I heard to where there was a flood in a town. And, uh, the guy went to the top of the roof and a boat came to get him and he said, no, no, no, don't worry. I don't need you here. Jesus is gonna save me. Water keeps filling up, filling up. A helicopter comes to get him. He says, man, I already told the other guy, I don't need you here. Jesus is gonna come to save me. So eventually the guy drowns, he dies and he gets to heaven and he looks at Jesus and he says, I thought you were gonna save me. And Jesus says, who do you think sent you the boat and the helicopter? You know? So I'm I'm getting these signs and where they signs, I'm not sure, but I just felt it wasn't my time to fight anymore.

• 2:10:46Speaker 01

  Uh, I don't think my mentality was in it anymore and I and I hung it up and I. I dedicated everything to Jiu Jitsu again. So I came back to Jiu Jitsu. I went to another ADCC, started competing in Jiu Jitsu a lot, focusing on my school. And that was the best thing I ever did was to get to stop fighting MMA because mentally, uh, it wasn't conducive for me anymore. It started to get like, fighting started giving you more anxiety. To where, you know, just the entire lifestyle, the way MMA is like, I remember training for a fight. No matter what I would be doing, I would never be able to enjoy the moment because I knew there was a fight coming. I knew there was another human out there training to to put

• 2:11:25Speaker 01

  me away. And I I I was missing moments with my daughter because I was focusing on a fight. And I didn't like that feeling. I was and that really contributed to the empty feeling that I had within me because I was never in any moment. I was just I I was I felt like I was floating. I was never able to have a a solid my my feet were never solid in the ground because I was always focusing on that fight, hoping for a victory. And then I would win. And then I know, oh, I know there's another fight.

• 2:11:54Jocko Willink?

  So that was kind of like King Mo was coming up at that time, right?

• 2:11:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, he was he would have been a tough fight for sure.

• 2:12:00Jocko Willink?

  I trained with him. I rolled in here one day and Dean's like, hey, bro, my buddy's here. We're training with him. And I go, oh, cool. He's like, you got to go train with him. He's a he's a like Olympic level wrestler. He didn't make the Olympics. He came in second on the Olympic trials, right? And I'm like, oh, hell, yeah. And so I rolled in there and like, we we clap hands and freaking he he did a takedown with me like his face hit me in the chest and his hands just like tapped the back of both my legs at the same time with the force I'd not felt before, like pop, like it all happened like in a millisecond. It's pop and I was on my ass and I was on my ass like like six feet away. And I was like, dude, that's a that's a

• 2:12:44Speaker 01

  The hype was he was a strong guy.

• 2:12:46Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And it was weird to watch his career go the way it went. Um, yeah, remember he ended up getting knocked out by a guy with like some weird kind of

• 2:12:53Speaker 01

  He he didn't use his wrestling a lot. He was starting, he became a boxer.

• 2:12:58Jocko Willink?

  And he was a super nice guy and he was actually as good as he was in his nickname, King Mo and stuff like he was super humble, always listen, like, ready to learn and like great to train with.

• 2:13:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:13:06Jocko Willink?

  Uh, I mean, you weren't going to get any takedowns on this. Well, I'll tell you that, like, you're gonna you're gonna be playing some

• 2:13:10Speaker 01

  He wasn't very he wasn't very big either, right? Like, he walked around like two ten, right?

• 2:13:14Jocko Willink?

  He probably walked around at two ten. He was not small, though.

• 2:13:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, strong muscle.

• 2:13:17Jocko Willink?

  Tall, strong and explosive. And the other thing that was crazy about him like, because, you know, he would we would all exchange, you know, techniques and stuff. But he would talk about these like takedowns and a couple of things that he would say is like, he would be looking at the ceiling on a takedown like

• 2:13:33Speaker 01

  That's crazy.

• 2:13:33Jocko Willink?

  He'd be like, you gotta look at the ceiling, like you, your head has to be up. But then he would also just sit there and like smash his face into the cage and grind his face like, putting pressure, like conditioning for his face and his head.

• 2:13:47Speaker 01

  Oh my god.

• 2:13:48Jocko Willink?

  Cause that's what he was gonna take you down with.

• 2:13:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:13:50Jocko Willink?

  His face. And, and he took me down with his face many times.

• 2:13:56Jocko Willink?

  And, uh, and also super explosive, like when you do a clean and jerk, when you watch an Olympic lifter do like, and they do like a, a split squat as they do the jerk. Like he would explain that that's what he was doing. He's like, I'm doing this, like that explosiveness is what I'm going into, so.

• 2:14:13Speaker 01

  You're telling me this and I'm saying to myself like, why the heck would I ever wanna fight this guy? Rubbing his face against the counter, I've got time for this.

• 2:14:23Jocko Willink?

  But, so you get a little bit more focused on jujitsu. I gotta go to this part of the book, cause it's pertinent to the world. You say, "Right now, I'm enjoying laying a beating on an arrogant prick of a purple belt. He's fresh off another win at a local Naga tournament. The kid wins everything, gi or no gi, it doesn't matter. He was bad enough in the beginning as an arrogant white belt. Now it's becoming apparent that he's actually very good. He's not just big and strong, he's smart. He also works hard, shows up every day, the full package. He walks into the gym with extra swagger, like a king returning from another victory. He does everything but ask a teammate to wash his car. He even has a cute girl on his arm, bringing her to witness the victory lap and run circles around some blue belts during practice. He's only been training a few years at this point. He has a lot to learn technically, sure, but more as a man.

• 2:15:09Jocko Willink?

  In a weird way, I really like the kid. Despite all of our efforts to beat his attitude out of him when he's a white belt, he just wouldn't eat the humble pie. It's the sort of pathological confidence you develop a respect for over time. You can beat the shit out of this kid, but you can't beat the attitude out of him. Then he starts getting really good. Now you really have a problem. Ego backed up with legitimate talent. While no one will say it to his face, everyone at Ocean County Jiu Jitsu knows that he's going to be special, and so does he. I pair up with him at the beginning and roll at a fast pace. At this moment in time, I am the superior grappler. I'm a dog who's been living on the streets. He's a dog who's been living inside. I throw him off with my physicality, forcing him to turtle twist, roll and shrimp his way back into defensible positions.

• 2:15:53Jocko Willink?

  All the while, I can't help but do a little shit talking in his ear. And yet, I also feel the kid is getting his composure back as the minutes tick on. He starts to right the ship, scoring a few minor victories. Like getting his frames in by shifting his weight to the side. I bait him with a faux submission attempt, the one I used last month on him. This time, he ignores the trap. As his breathing gets under control, the veil that is constantly over him has briefly lifted. I see his face, bright red with sweat and frustration. I see a kid that needs to win. A kid that doesn't acknowledge losing like a normal person. I could beat him all day like this, every day, it wouldn't matter. He would just keep coming back for more. When we finish out the roll, I'm surprisingly tired. A year from now, he'll be as good as Gary.

• 2:16:35Jocko Willink?

  Five years from now, who knows what the ceiling is? "You know I own your ass, right?" I ask him. He blinks rapidly and heaves out between big breaths. "If you need to take a break, I can give you a minute." The stones on this kid, I love it. This, of course, is Gordon Ryan, the best grappler in the world.

• 2:16:55Speaker 01

  Oh my god, that was literally exactly what happened. And there's a picture of that. And when, that's exact day, when his girlfriend's sitting on the side and I'm smashing him. And I'm smiling in the camera.

• 2:17:09Speaker 01

  Man, that's the thing that Gordon came up, like Jersey's a little different. Like our training is very hard-nosed and we're a bunch of people that all-

• 2:17:17Jocko Willink?

  You think that's like the wrestling base in there or something like that?

• 2:17:20Speaker 01

  And we all came from backgrounds where our fathers were a little, uh... Not that stable.

• 2:17:26Jocko Willink?

  Heavy-handed.

• 2:17:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, not stable. And, yeah, Gordon was something, man. He was something special and-

• 2:17:34Speaker 01

  I knew, you could even ask him, I always knew if he stood with it.

• 2:17:37Jocko Willink?

  Did he start at your school?

• 2:17:39Speaker 01

  No, he started with my, my best friend, Haz, Haseem. He gave his school to Gary. So he started with Haz and then Gary took over the school. That's where Gordon was. Gordon was never my student. Always like a little brother.

• 2:17:54Jocko Willink?

  And he started at 15?

• 2:17:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. And he used to do like Kimbo Slice fights, like in his yard. He used to like, do fights for money. And he had like a mohawk, like he's just like a little.

• 2:18:04Jocko Willink?

  Fistfights?

• 2:18:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, fistfights, yeah. Like a little degenerate, you know? But he was just the cockiest thing ever, man. It was, and, and he was very annoying. Like I remember one time he annoyed me so much, I blocked him on like every social media. And he was making like fake screen names and still messaging me to like get his point across. I'm just like, you're so terrible, you know? But yeah, it came to a point to where you almost had to start respecting it because what, the things that people hate about Gordon are the same exact things that make Gordon Gordon. You know, he is, he's someone that I believe, like when I say, you know, stay in the moment, be happy. I don't think he has that at all. I think Gordon is constantly out to prove something.

• 2:18:49Speaker 01

  And I think Gordon, no matter how much he wins, he wants more. So I don't know if he's ever happy. But at the same time, it's also making him and made him already at his young age, the best grappler to ever live, and that's undeniable, right? So you gotta ask yourself, are you willing, the fact that he's willing to have that mindset for an elongated period of time and like live this way indefinitely? And still get up every day and do it? That's a rarity.

• 2:19:14Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, to be, to get to the top of the mountain and then keep climbing is, is rare.

• 2:19:20Speaker 01

  Very rare.

• 2:19:21Jocko Willink?

  I mean, he's winning easily. Look.

• 2:19:25Speaker 01

  Oh, easily, very easily.

• 2:19:26Jocko Willink?

  It's, I hate to use the word easily, but he's winning relatively easily. The best guys in the world and he's still doing what got him there. And that's a hard thing to find. Most people, they get to the top and they're like, cool, time to take a breather. And they, that's why they don't stay up there. He just doesn't seem to care. I mean, I know he's got some health issues, which is a, which is a horrible. He seems to fight through them and.

• 2:19:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, he does. But he gets, he has this stomach issue where he's just constantly nauseous, like always nauseous. But it's like. There hasn't been someone recently that's been even close to challenging him like we saw what he did to Galvao it was just like it looked like a uh an intermediate student against the an expert student it was just crazy.

• 2:20:09Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and just for people that don't know jiu jitsu like Andre Galvao was one of the greatest competitors.

• 2:20:15Speaker 01

  Andre is the most winningest ADCC champion in history.

• 2:20:19Jocko Willink?

  And that looked like a one sided match.

• 2:20:21Speaker 01

  It was it was amazing. They say his match with me, a lot of people say Mason could give him a tough time. The only way Mason could give him a tough time is if Mason stalls well and then gets to overtime. So EBI rules are the only way in my opinion that you could possibly be quarter. Maybe you could hang on to his back longer than he hangs on to yours. I doubt it. I doubt it, but we saw Nicky Rod at success some success against him in the ADCC. I mean the EBI rule set, uh which I never liked the EBI rule set. I don't want someone to start on my back unless they earn that, right? Like uh so many times you see people just get mauled in regulation to go on to overtime and win.

• 2:20:59Speaker 01

  You know, those boys were actually winning in regulation and in OT. A lot of people now in that that rules that they stall in regulation and they just make it to OT and then they they find a way to win. They get the double on the hooks on the back and they hold longer. So I I don't know, man. I don't see. I mean, Yuri's a very tough guy. Yuri's match against Gordon and actually the Nogi Worlds uh the last Nogi Worlds that Gordon won, the only one he competed again, it was it could have went to Yuri. It was super, super close, right? Yuri is a monster and I know Yuri wants this victory. Uh this is the next ADCC super fight that's gonna take place in August of September, about 225.

• 2:21:39Jocko Willink?

  And where's Gordon walking around at right now?

• 2:21:41Speaker 01

  About 220.

• 2:21:43Jocko Willink?

  Dude, Gordon's huge.

• 2:21:44Speaker 01

  He looks much bigger than he is.

• 2:21:47Jocko Willink?

  No, like the last time I saw him was at UFC and I'd I'd been around him before at events, but it was like the first time he was like recognized. We like shook hands like, hey, good to meet you. But he's a freaking large dude.

• 2:22:01Speaker 01

  Six three, every bit of six three.

• 2:22:03Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:03Speaker 01

  Large, big frame. He's a big dude, man. It's crazy. So people don't understand that he was.

• 2:22:08Jocko Willink?

  I can't believe he's only 220.

• 2:22:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's not. He's not. I think the heaviest he ever was like. Two thirty-five and then he got sick and he lost a bunch of weight. But like he won ADCC when he was one ninety-three. You know, so he's not just winning. A lot of people, the haters will say it's because of steroids. No, let me tell you something. Let me tell you something, everybody listening, your hero most likely is on the juice, right? Like everybody in ADC, I don't want to say everybody, I'd say over ninety-five percent of people in ADCC are on something. And I will also tell you something. It's not making them win. Right? Their technique is making them win. The steroids are taking, yes, it helps them, but it's helping them to recover. You cannot train at a high level, as a high level athlete and not supplement with something.

• 2:22:55Speaker 01

  It's very hard because your body constantly gets broken down over and over and over. Your testosterone levels are actually lowering because you're beating yourself into the ground. You know, when I started TRT, I never juiced before and my testosterone levels were at like three hundred, very low because you're training two. So, exercise could increase your testosterone, but over-exercise could actually reduce your testosterone. So, I was training so much, I actually, I was harming myself more than helping myself, you know? So, he's not winning because of juice, he's winning because he's good, man. You know, that's it.

• 2:23:30Jocko Willink?

  No, yeah, clearly, I mean, just the technique that he brings and you watch him, it's it's freaking impressive.

• 2:23:38Jocko Willink?

  He's impressive.

• 2:23:39Speaker 01

  He's a once in a lifetime athlete.

• 2:23:40Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:41Speaker 01

  I don't think there's ever been an athlete in any sport that has been as dominant as he is in his sport. There hasn't, I mean, I mean Tyson, but not for as long as Gordon was, right? Tyson until he lost to Buster Douglas. You know, Mayweather was dominant, but Mayweather wasn't finishing people, you know? So, I mean, Michael Jordan was something, but it's two totally different.

• 2:24:01Jocko Willink?

  The other thing is, he's, he's stayed where he's at through a large kind of revolutionary.

• 2:24:12Jocko Willink?

  Progression.

• 2:24:13Speaker 01

  Hundred percent.

• 2:24:13Jocko Willink?

  Jiu Jitsu is different now than it was three years ago and different now than it was six years ago.

• 2:24:18Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 2:24:18Jocko Willink?

  And I mean, you could say, I guess he's in some ways, leading that progression.

• 2:24:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:24:23Jocko Willink?

  But like, there's people that are doing things that, three years ago, weren't happening. Like, this was not a part of Jiu Jitsu. Jiu Jitsu is different now. Every, and it changes like, almost, I would say, every six months, if you're not in the game, you're out of the game.

• 2:24:36Speaker 01

  There's a seventeen year old who just won ADCC trials at the, at a hundred and forty-two pounds.

• 2:24:41Jocko Willink?

  Oh yeah, that's right.

• 2:24:42Speaker 01

  He just ripped through everyone.

• 2:24:44Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 2:24:44Speaker 01

  Uh, man, this kid was impressive. His, his tenacity was something that people just don't understand. We understand, cause, you know, a lot of people, I always say, people start trying to pass the guard from the feet, until they can't pass the guard from the feet, and in about thirty seconds or a minute, they go to their knees. This kid won seven, eight matches, on his feet, passing the guard the entire time. He never went to his knees. It was the craziest thing that I've seen. To keep that mental fortitude, that entire time, and to not have a, a dent in your armor, it was truly something impressive. Like, I, I was, wow. It's almost, it's almost like he's too young to understand that it should have been harder.

• 2:25:23Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, there's, it's like, you know, when you think of chain wrestling, when I think of chain wrestling, at the high level, I think like, you're chain wrestling like seven, eight, things are getting connected together, right? Like, you're thinking about, like, a guard passer, like, like him, like a modern guard passer, the chain is like twenty-nine.

• 2:25:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:25:41Jocko Willink?

  Things that are going on.

• 2:25:42Speaker 01

  It's crazy.

• 2:25:42Jocko Willink?

  Twenty-nine things.

• 2:25:46Jocko Willink?

  And it's all these, and you make a fraction of a second over there, and another millisecond over there, and another millisecond over there, and finally, you get a quarter second that you need to get that knee through, or whatever. That's what's going down.

• 2:25:57Speaker 01

  And what's crazy is, what I saw him do so many times, he would be stopped, so he would do the same thing all over again. It's like, he never had a, like, most people have a breaking point, where like, You know, they try it so many times that eventually when they don't get it, they're like, all right, I don't got it. This kid, man, you could, like, I saw it with Ethan. Ethan Krillstein stopped him over and over and over and over. Thirty seconds left in the match. He finally passed the guard and won. He did something. He doesn't even realize how mentally tough he was. You know what it looks like? It almost looks like he was, he was made, like, he's a machine bred just for this. All he knows is this. You know, he only knows this.

• 2:26:38Jocko Willink?

  What's his background? He's been training his whole life?

• 2:26:39Speaker 01

  Wrestling. He's a purple button jiu-jitsu and a wrestler.

• 2:26:41Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:43Speaker 01

  He's gonna be special.

• 2:26:44Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, there you go. Uh, going back to the book here, this, you say it, I hi, at this point, I made one of the best decisions I've ever made. I hired two people to run the operations of the academy. The first was my black belt, Craig Izzo. The second was a student Danielle, who had been training with us for a while. Was that Danielle Kelly?

• 2:27:02Speaker 01

  No, no, Danielle, this, uh, Danielle Shirelli, her name is. She, she actually, uh, my current girlfriend, uh, we've been together for a few years now. Uh, man, she made things easy. Talk about a woman's touch. Uh, you know, my school was successful before her, but my school wasn't, I, there was a lot of things that weren't happening, you know, like I would still have like seventeen to twenty delinquents a month. Uh, that means people aren't paying. Uh, and I just think in some aspects, like, women just do things better than men. Uh, the things that'll kind of drive us insane. Uh, but when they do it for your business, it's actually nothing but great. And, uh,

• 2:27:44Speaker 01

  when I gave that aspect, she, she initially started helping me, uh, during like COVID. And we never dipped during the pandemic. We never lost students because we were doing hardcore Zoom classes, like professionally rammed Zoom classes. And, uh, we had a women's program before her, but it was never big. And she started with the women's program. And she, she's built like, I, I tell her, she's like, she doesn't like when I say it. She's like a Clydesdale horse, right? She's just stacked.

• 2:28:11Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, most, most girls aren't gonna take that as a big compliment.

• 2:28:13Speaker 01

  She is, she is, she's a strong girl. So she ran the women's program. And she really started to build this women's program. And I, and I feel when schools have a large women programs, that says something. Positive for the school. So all I was doing the teaching of the advanced classes. She started doing all the behind the scenes stuff and people got to realize behind the scenes stuff is what makes or breaks the academy. I ran the school successfully. A lot of it was just my reputation, but we took it to the next level when she started doing everything that we should do because for me, I knew a lot of the things we should do. I just didn't have, I hate to say it, I had the discipline to do it all the time where she does, right? And the organization, the organizational skills that she has, you know, she took over

• 2:28:57Speaker 01

  everything. She started running. She does all my contracts for my, my affiliation and my contracts doesn't, it's not a, the contract basically consists if we split, you just can't use my name anymore. That's it. I don't want to lock you. If you don't want to be a part of me, I don't want, I don't want you a part of me, you know, but yeah, she made things a thousand times easier, man, you know? It, it's interesting. Sometimes, you know, like all couples, you have your, your ups and your downs. So if we're having some downs and we go into the school, you know, I just stand and match. She stays in the office and it works out. But yeah, she does so well and made things so much easier for me.

• 2:29:30Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, definitely. A little bit of decentralized command goes, goes a long way. That's for sure. You end up doing ADCC again, 2014, 2015, you in the IBJJF Nogi Masters Worlds. And you also did your weight and absolute.

• 2:29:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, I never realized, but well, this puts in this perspective. I competed in ADCC in September at 217. In November, I competed. I was 245 pounds.

• 2:30:02Jocko Willink?

  Wait, say that one more time. Let me, let me track this.

• 2:30:04Speaker 01

  Yep. 217, ADCC.

• 2:30:07Jocko Willink?

  What month was that? In September, okay.

• 2:30:09Speaker 01

  November, I competed at 245.

• 2:30:12Jocko Willink?

  Damn.

• 2:30:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, I went through a little rough moment.

• 2:30:14Jocko Willink?

  You got your grub on.

• 2:30:15Speaker 01

  No, I sure did. It wasn't 25 pounds of muscle. There, there is a picture of me breathing out where my friend would just always send randomly and it's dawning, like the photographer who took it clearly must hate me because why you would ever post this. It's just, I'm, my hand is kind of like, like just limp and I'm breathing out of my stomach is protruding. I won the absolute division, but I jumped in that thing. Ah, you know, do the masters division. It'll be easy. There are so many angry guys between 30 and 35 years old, man, that I, I, I was like, my, what did I get myself into? So, uh. Yeah, I ended up winning. I actually, that photo, my, my friend was sending it to me all the time. I was, you know what? I was like, I'm gonna take this.

• 2:30:57Jocko Willink?

  Just fat shaming you.

• 2:30:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, so you know, I made, I made it before and after. I made it, that was my before and I made an after. And I like, kinda like, now he can't use it. Cause if anyone ever saw Eight Mile with Eminem, the last rap battle, he, everything you could say bad about himself, he says. So the guy can't attack him with it anymore. So I was like, I'm putting my weakest moment out there for everyone to see. What could you do anymore? I'm gonna keep sending the picture. I already posted it. I don't care. But it is quite an embarrassing photo. Quite an embarrassing photo.

• 2:31:26Jocko Willink?

  What do you walk around at normal weight?

• 2:31:27Speaker 01

  Now I'm like two thirteen, two fourteen. Uh, usually I was like two twenty-five to two thirty. But two forty-five was heavy for me. Very heavy for me. Like, anything now above two twenty for me is sort of go a little, a little soft.

• 2:31:43Jocko Willink?

  I got to two fifty one time. Like it was a goal, right? And I was like in a platoon and we were all trying to be as big as you could be. And we're just deadlifting and squatting. And we were trying to get our average platoon weight up above two hundred pounds. And you know, you've got some guys in the platoon that are like one fifty-eight or something like this, right? So they're gonna put on ten pounds, you know, cause they're hard gainers, right? That's what it's called, right? Hard gainers. So they can only put on ten pounds, you know? It's like hard for them. So it's, it's, it's on the rest of us. To bring it up. So, you know, I was just eating and deadlifting and squatting and I finally, I, we, I was like one, or sorry, two, like, forty-seven or something. And I went on deployment. And the first place we went on deployment was a place in Spain that had the all-you-can-eat buffet

• 2:32:28Jocko Willink?

  for lunch and dinner. And I was like, I got this. I got this. So I roll in there like four days. And I get to two fifty and I was like, oh, it's cool, two fifty. Like, I helped out the platoon, we're good. And then I went on a four-mile run.

• 2:32:43Speaker 01

  Oh, boy.

• 2:32:44Jocko Willink?

  And I was like, terrible. And I was like, alright, this is game over. Like, I can't do this. This is just not good.

• 2:32:50Speaker 01

  It's so odd when I I went through moments like that too, where I thought I was big and strong and like, and then I look at pictures, I'm like, you slob. Like, why did I think I was so muscular? And I was, I was big, but there was so much unhealthiness to that, you know what I mean? Like, I don't know how you were at 250.

• 2:33:09Jocko Willink?

  I actually think I just look like a little bit the same, just a little bit bigger all around. You know, like, I kind of just like gained weight.

• 2:33:18Speaker 01

  What's your walking weight?

• 2:33:19Jocko Willink?

  225.

• 2:33:20Speaker 01

  You're, you're always a big, strong guy. Some people handle it, wear it well. Like, I, I could, a lot of people don't think I'm even 215. They think I'm lighter, they think I'm like 190. But I can handle like 225, 230. Get above 230, it starts getting a little, Yeah. A little mushy.

• 2:33:37Jocko Willink?

  The way I feel above like 230, I start to feel like not good.

• 2:33:43Speaker 01

  That's the thing, like when I travel, when I'm heavy, it's hard, man. Because all the walking to the airport, to travel, the weight matters, you know? It's like wearing a rucking vest, right? Like, when you're, when you're walking around with a 25 pound vest, like, you know, that's why so many people, they're like, a lot of my, my students, like white belts, blue belts, oh, my knee is bad, my back is bad. But sometimes I'll be 30, 40, 50 pounds overweight. And like, I, I say to them, like, listen, don't get offended, but the first thing,

• 2:34:07Jocko Willink?

  Don't get offended, but.

• 2:34:08Speaker 01

  The first thing you should do for your knees and your back is take off that 25 pound weight vest. So I'm not wearing a weight vest. No, you are. You know, like, you just don't realize it, you know? And you do feel a lot better when you're lighter, man. 100%.

• 2:34:21Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 2:34:24Jocko Willink?

  This, then you roll into BJJ Fanatics, which, this is, you know, you tell the story in the book, but like, BJJ Fanatics is a website, BJJFanatics.com. It's run by a guy named Mike Zenga and Bernardo Faria is a world champion. Like, great dudes, and they made this website that they had this vision of it basically being like the Netflix of jiu-jitsu. And they're very fair with the instructors, because they, basically, if you're a jiu-jitsu name, you can go on to BJJ Fanatics and make. Instructional videos about whatever it is that you're good at, you know, you've got some technique that you're good at, or some broad strategy that you do, or whatever, whatever's gonna help people with jiu-jitsu. VJJfanatics.com, they, they made this.

• 2:35:08Jocko Willink?

  And you kinda, you know, you tell the story that you, they're like, hey, you gotta come to Boston to film. And you're kinda like, dude, why you go to Boston to film? I'll just send you a video. You're kinda like, this is, doesn't seem to make much sense, blah, blah, blah.

• 2:35:22Jocko Willink?

  And then, a month later, you get your first check.

• 2:35:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was a changing moment in my life, man. That like, that gave me the ability to not be stressed every month, you know? Uh, yeah, I'm, I'm, they sent me like a $40,000 check, it was crazy. And, you know, the thing is, BJ Fanatics-

• 2:35:40Jocko Willink?

  What's really crazy about that is like, just so everyone knows, there's no money in jiu-jitsu. Every championship that we just talked about, you winning, you didn't get paid $1. You don't get for nothing, nothing. Maybe if you win ADC, you could get like 40 grand. That's the champion of the world.

• 2:35:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:35:56Jocko Willink?

  That's trials, you get nothing. Like your team thing, you get to masters, not worlds, nothing. No gi ma, no gi worlds, nothing. You get nothing. You don't get anything from jiu-jitsu. So you can have a school, and you know, what is a school? A school, as you just mentioned, a school means you're working 24 hours a day, basically. And look, we all love to teach, but it's, you're working all the time, and you're gonna make money, but you're gonna get by. It's more like get by money. So to get a check for 40 grand-

• 2:36:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:36:25Jocko Willink?

  For doing the jiu-jitsu that you love, for a month, it's residual too, right?

• 2:36:30Speaker 01

  Like, like, I haven't made a DVD or an instructional now, I'm probably like, two years. I, I, Zang is on my, my ass about it, I really gotta do it.

• 2:36:38Jocko Willink?

  He'll be calling you.

• 2:36:39Speaker 01

  Yeah. But it's like, uh, it's still residual income that I get every month, right? Cause every month, there's new people who are rolling jiu-jitsu, every month that buy my instructional. Literally, since I made my last instructional, I think I made like 13 or 14. My game has changed so much, I have to make another one. Uh, it's quite incredible. It gave jiu-jitsu athletes financial security. The, the crazy thing is, there's- There's well-known guys out there that don't sell well. They just don't sell well, right? So you have to connect with your audience. So they let anyone film. Whoever wants to film, you wanna film, film, right? But not everybody makes money. So it's like, there's guys who have sold three instructional's maybe to their students.

• 2:37:18Speaker 01

  And there's people who have an audience that, that feel like Gordon has months where he makes 200 grand. You know, and it's just like, the more popular you are, the more people relate to you, the more money you make. So it's really ultimately completely up to you and how you connect with people, right? And it gave Jiu-Jitsu guys the opportunity to make money, to be successful, to not just make money, but to make good money, to become wealthy. And actually, it forces them to remain disciplined in the social media aspect, right? Because you have to connect. If you don't connect, you don't sell. And a lot of people hate social media. I get it. And there's a lot of terrible aspects of social media. But there's a lot of incredible aspects of social media.

• 2:38:01Speaker 01

  Social media has given a lot of people the opportunity to be very, very successful. I don't know whether there's more positive or more negative aspects of it, but I choose to, you know, look at the positive. Even my Instagram, my explorer page, it's all stuff that I like to see. It's not like, I mean, sometimes there's some funny stuff that I like to see, right? But, you know.

• 2:38:22Speaker 02

  Yes, sir.

• 2:38:23Speaker 01

  I choose not to go on the page where, if I'm looking to learn from somebody, I wanna make sure I can put a face to the name and I wanna know what that person has done. You know, and I wanna be able to know the inspiration they're giving is coming from a place of experience. I remember one, there was a pretty popular men's page on Instagram. And I talked to the dude, he was 18 years old. And I'm like, brother, you're teaching men how to be men. You know, like, you just started shaving. What's going on right now? That reminded me of Gary. I remember one time Gary was teaching and I had a, I had a student that was, he made a few million a year. He was a very successful guy. And Gary, after the Jiu-Jitsu class, was like giving a speech to the class about how they're all failures and this and that.

• 2:39:08Speaker 01

  I'm like, Gary, brother, keep it to Jiu-Jitsu, man. You're just a kid. You know what I mean? Relax.

• 2:39:17Jocko Willink?

  So, you know, at this point, you do more.

• 2:39:22Jocko Willink?

  Instructionals, you end up getting into the New Jersey Martial Arts Hall of Fame. I didn't even know there was one, but you're in it. That's for damn sure. 2016 ADCC US National Pro Champion, 2016 ADCC North American 99+ Trials Champion again. 2017 Fight to Win, 2018 Fight to Win Champion. You beat Rico Rodriguez in 2017. 2019, the Kassai Pro Super Fight Winner. So you got all kinds of, all kinds of good stuff going on. And then of course, 2020 hits. I'm gonna go to the book here for 2020.

• 2:40:07Jocko Willink?

  "My father getting sick wasn't entirely a surprise to me. There were early signs before my own run with COVID started in earnest. Before I was hospitalized, I gave my father enough medicine for a small army. Vitamin C, D, supplements, antioxidants, everything I had. Living in the same house, you can try to be careful, but you can only do so much. We knew he could get sick if I got sick. I told him to be safe and be smart. He did neither. Then again, I'm not sure if I was being safe or smart myself, training in a gym every night with hundreds of students. He didn't take anything I gave him. Even after he went from sick to very sick, he was from a different time, a time when you just gutted everything out.

• 2:40:49Jocko Willink?

  While all his ailments, addictions, and being over 65 on top of that, the disease worked its way through him with very little resistance. Even a medical team working around the clock would have had their work cut out for them. By the time he was admitted to a hospital, he was clinging to life. Just as with me, there would be no visits."

• 2:41:14Jocko Willink?

  After I fast forward a little bit, after about a week, I walked into my mother in the kitchen. She held a phone to her ear and was nodding to a voice on the other side. Tears were in her eyes as she kept nodding to a person that obviously couldn't see her. I knew as soon as I saw her, what she was being told. But she said the two words that confirmed it. How long?

• 2:41:38Jocko Willink?

  The curse of modern medicine is how long it can keep us alive, well after we should be. Fifty years ago, my father would have passed away in a week. Now, the days ticked on. He spent a week in hospice, then a week and a half, then two weeks. He was more or less asleep at this time. His waking moments never going beyond a basic sort of awareness of the room and its occupants.

• 2:42:03Jocko Willink?

  I was told I could finally come and visit the old man. They said he was very close to leaving us, but admitted that he had far outlasted any of their original predictions. If they ever give you the opportunity to say goodbye to a loved one, think carefully about it. Often, the last thing you see is the most enduring memory. A human who's gone two weeks without food doesn't look like a human anymore. When I entered the room with my father, I thought I had entered the wrong room for a couple of seconds. He was like a skeleton, reduced to the bare minimum of muscle, mass, and body composition. I remember his chin bones sticking out, maybe a full inch from his lips, an odd detail that stuck with me. His eyes were merely rolled to different sides.

• 2:42:48Jocko Willink?

  And he likely hadn't used them for days despite their being open. Half his hair had fallen out, and his body looks like parts of it were literally missing. He was covered in a large robe, and I thank God I didn't have to see what his body looked like underneath. I will never forget that image.

• 2:43:07Jocko Willink?

  I spoke to my father, starting at around 5:00 in the afternoon. We spoke until the sunset. We spoke into the night. We spoke long after most of the nurses and doctors had gone home for the night, through the shift changes and check-ins. He could only groan and moan, but he often did this in response to things I said. It was clear he was aware and listening, at least on some level. The only message I wanted to convey was that it was okay for him to let go. Stop being so stubborn and let this world go. I told him that I loved him, that he would always be my best friend. I forgave him for all the things he ever did to me. I said that I would take care of mom and take care of his grandkids.

• 2:43:53Jocko Willink?

  And I'll close out the book with this here.

• 2:43:56Jocko Willink?

  "I think about the reality that I am with him now on the last night of his life.

• 2:44:03Jocko Willink?

  I may very well see his life slip away in the next hour or even minutes. I have a realization that speaking to my dad is as much for my benefit as his. It fends off the dark thoughts like a torch in the night. All his darkness and all his love have resulted in a strange mixture that was me. It reminded me of oil and water that naturally separate in the bottle. My father had done terrible things to me, yet he also loved me with all his heart and wanted nothing more than to take back all those things. The oil should have corrupted the water,

• 2:44:42Jocko Willink?

  but somehow they both remained, and I had taken from each of them to become who I am." "You showed up," I whispered to him. "Maybe not every day, maybe not for every important moment, but you're showing up now for the last few years, and we're all grateful."

• 2:45:03Jocko Willink?

  I felt like I saw the slightest twitch in his eyes.

• 2:45:12Speaker 01

  That's pretty, that's pretty much it, but one thing I didn't put in the book is uh, excuse me.

• 2:45:21Speaker 01

  I, I had covid, I didn't know I had covid. My dad was a very, very good grandfather to my kids. Uh, he loved them and they adored him, but he would nod out. And I knew why he was nodding out. I knew he was doing something besides just the methadone, you know? And then I looked over one day and I said, Dad, you cannot get high in front of my kids. Like, we just can't have this, you know? And I looked over one day and uh,

• 2:45:47Speaker 01

  he nodded out and he was sleeping on my daughter. It wasn't like asleep like where he was just tired. He nodded out. And I, and I got furious, you know, I, I pulled him upstairs and uh,

• 2:46:02Speaker 01

  I didn't know I had covid, I had a gun and I'm like, it, it got very emotional. I'm like, is this what you want? And I put the gun in my mouth and then uh, he's like, no, no, no. And then I, I put the gun by him. Uh, I didn't know I had covid, right? And

• 2:46:21Speaker 01

  whatever, we got over like our million other fights that we got over, but I was very, very disappointed in him. And he went to apologize to me the next day. Halfway when he was walking in, he literally fell asleep in the middle of the room. Like he was walking and he stopped and he just nodded out in the middle of the room. And I was like, man, there's no, this is just, there's, I'm fighting a lifetime to make this guy okay and he'll just never change. So I heard him cough and I was like, man, I, I, I lost it. I was like, you have covid. I was like, you have covid. Cause I found out I had covid like two days later. He's like, no, no, I'll be okay, I'll be okay.

• 2:47:04Speaker 01

  I got, this one, my, uh, I was out of the house and my house wasn't built yet. And so I was getting my, my smaller house built next to their house at the time. But uh, I was living in my old room for a few months and uh,

• 2:47:24Speaker 01

  I got really sick. I was going through a lot of stress and finally I started like vomiting blood and I I just wasn't well. And I went to the hospital. I had to go to the hospital. I forgot everything. I lost my memory in the hospital. I didn't even know why I was there. It was so odd. So I never experienced anything like this. That's like with covid, I was always like, yeah, I believe covid's real. There's it seems like there's people on one side or the other like all covid's fake or all covid, you know, you want grandma to die. No, I believe covid's real, but I never believed we should be shut down. Right? That's just my attitude about it. It's another thing. But by the time I got out of the hospital, he was in the hospital, you

• 2:48:02Speaker 01

  know, and my dad's on methadone. They didn't give him his methadone for the first two or three days, which you can't do that, you know, and he was on 80 milligrams of methadone a day. Ever since that, he was just completely like nonverbal. He was very much able to like look at you and make eye contact with you. And I was actually able to go for a little longer than I did. I just didn't have the balls to do it. So finally, when I went, yeah, everything I said, like he I saw the fear in his eye, you know, the fear in his eyes, like he was afraid. My dad was always afraid of death because he actually did die and get brought back before. And when

• 2:48:44Speaker 01

  he died, that he told me the one time he's what he saw his dream when he died was a bunch of men with like melted faces just walking around aimlessly, like just moaning, were nowhere to go, no end to it. I gather that's hell, whatever you, you know, assume hell to be. He told the priest that before and the priest just told him to pray, pray, pray. Well, I know my father worried is that's what are you gonna see that again? But I know for a fact, if there's a thing such as heaven or hell, my dad earned his spot. He was in I just wanted my father to just forget about

• 2:49:27Speaker 01

  all the times he's hurt me and just focus on his grandkids and just be happy because he's an amazing grandparent to my my children. And my daughter is still is heartbroken over his loss, over his death. And I said, don't worry, like you could go like, you know, you're suffering now, but the suffering is gonna be. Not that much longer after that tattooed on me, suffer well, you know, I said, you know, you lived a certain life and now is your time, maybe, he was on hospice for 16 days, uh, which is a long time on hospice, you know, and, uh,

• 2:50:01Speaker 01

  I, I don't believe, like, I felt my father's presence heavy after he passed away and the way he died, since I'm the one who gave him COVID, it was very ironic in the sense that I only wanted him to be okay my entire life and then I'm the one who actually gave him COVID and in the way I gave him COVID was through an aggressive argument. Uh, so it was just very terrible. It was very, very hard for me to deal with. I, I, I carried the weight of that burden, like, my whole life, I just wanted him okay. But then I realized, like, I'm the one who helped to put him out of his misery. The only peace for my father was in death, for sure. And my mother, she would have died, for sure,

• 2:50:43Speaker 01

  of a nervous breakdown. She was still working, you know, she was, you know, much, she, she was out of shape, overweight, very depressed, anxiety-stricken. I actually chose to go back there rather than get another place because my mom was taking him to the methanol clinic every day before work. So she would drive 30 minutes to the clinic, 30 minutes back home, 40 minutes to work, work all day, get home by six at night, be up at four in the morning for the next day. So I said, you know, I'll start taking dad. So I started taking him. And, uh, you know, here I am, me, this few years ago, driving my dad back and forth to the methanol clinic, you know, not, not everything is always what it seems. And I'm pretty known for being pretty transparent on social media about my past and about my

• 2:51:26Speaker 01

  life and my, my shortcomings and my struggle, mental health and stuff. Uh, but I felt so bad for, you know, ultimately killing him, you know, and people say, oh, no, you didn't kill him. Well, no, it's called a spade a spade. I did. And it is what it is. It just is what it is. And, uh, but in his death, he was given peace and I believe life. And my mother was given another life. She went through a really hard time for like six months to a year and now my mom is happier than she's ever been. I, I got her to retire early, you know, I take care of her. She helps me with my kids, uh, She she needs me with the house. She lives, it's my home.

• 2:52:09Speaker 01

  But she lives there, of course. I live in the smaller, the smaller uh section. It's like six feet from each other. Uh I take care of everything. Just got them. My mom never had central air or nothing. I just got her central air. I'm able to do a lot of nice things for her, you know, uh. And and I'm thankful to do that. So. Sometimes through tragedy. It's tragic at the time, but sometimes we don't always understand why things are the way they are. We don't always. Things don't always go the way we want them to go, but sometimes they go the way we need them to go, you know? So my dad was in my dreams for a long time. You know, I felt him for a long time and and. I basically said like, man, like, I can't have you here, you know, like, I can't.

• 2:52:53Speaker 01

  Have you in my dreams. I I don't want to really think about you. I don't want to really. The only time I'll talk to my dad is when I ask him to help my kids, watch over my kids. Uh because I can't live with him in thought. I still have a lot more to do because that paralyzes me. You know, it it makes me. It affects my mood. Even now, when I'm talking about it, I'm not letting myself get attached. To the conversation. I'm talking about it from. I'm cutting my myself out of the equation. It's like I'm almost like I'm talking about a movie that I've seen. I'm not putting myself in the equation. Because I can't let myself get emotionally invested, because when I let myself get emotionally invested. It weighs heavily on me. And when it weighs heavily on me, I I'm very.

• 2:53:38Speaker 01

  Me, when I'm.

• 2:53:42Speaker 01

  Depressed or feeling bad, it's it's dangerous, not just for me, but for. For for other people, you know, like. If I get cut off on the road or something like that, something that should never even bother me, something that's just so minimal, that could. That could actually really affect me because I'm being emotional. And anytime. A man is run on his emotion, he's basically an overgrown infant. You know, that's what it comes down to. I always tell my students, you cannot be emotional. You have to be strategic. You can't, at the moment, you're emotional, you lose everything, you know, uh and I do get emotional. When it came to him, so. Uh yeah, I haven't, I don't really like waste time thinking about him because I do believe we'll be together again and it's.

• 2:54:24Speaker 01

  Life is crazy, man. Like, I was laying out my daughter the other day. And it's like one day she's gonna go through everything that I went through, you know, and it's just the time I'm here, I just need to make sure I I get them ready for my my sole purpose with my kids is I want them happy and I want them healthy, but I wanna get them ready to live where they don't need me. That's it, right? Once I know my kids don't need me, I'm at peace. And that's all I need. I need I need more time with them to to to get them ready for the world because the world is cold, the world is brutal as we know. And they'll never experience the pain that I felt, but at the same time, that's also a scary thing, right? Because what makes us us?

• 2:55:05Speaker 01

  It's our pain, but we don't want our kids to feel that pain. So how do we have our kids? Gee, you're doing a good job, right? Obviously, that's success right there. When your child could grow and be successful and be happy. No matter what you do in the world, no matter you Jocko being Jocko, if your daughter struggle tremendously, it's very hard to find true peace and happiness, you know?

• 2:55:29Jocko Willink?

  Be awful.

• 2:55:29Speaker 01

  But the fact that you could walk on the mats and train with her and be with her, she's your best friend. And to have that relationship with my daughter, you know, to where she wants to be around me. And a lot of people think I'm that dad that's like hard nose and don't do this. No, I I wanna know you, Isabel. I wanna know your problems. I wanna know what you're going through. And I want you to understand everything I say to you. It's for you. It's not for me, you know? So I learned a lot. I'm so thankful for my father. I learned a lot about how to be a man, but also how not to be a man through him, you know? So ultimately, life is a trip, man. It's it's it's quite insane, but uh.

• 2:56:10Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and it's I didn't do the book justice today because the way the book is written, it's actually you. It's at the the the setting of the book is you and you're you're driving your dad to the methode clinic.

• 2:56:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:56:24Jocko Willink?

  And it's day after day after day, and you're you're telling him your life story, the parts that he's missing. So. Yeah, I could, it would be weird. I would have just had to read like the audio book if I was gonna do that, right? So get the book, everybody. Um, there's so many lessons that we didn't talk about today. And then you're still doing all kinds of other stuff. Buddies Over Bullies.

• 2:56:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:56:46Jocko Willink?

  Dot com or dot org.

• 2:56:47Speaker 01

  Dot org.

• 2:56:48Jocko Willink?

  Buddies Over Bullies dot org. How did that get started? Did that get started when somebody sent you like a bullying?

• 2:56:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:56:55Jocko Willink?

  Social media thing?

• 2:56:55Speaker 01

  This girl was getting viciously attacked on the bus by some older boys. And I was like, man, like, this is just horrendous. So. I said, if someone find me this girl, and they found me her parents, or her mom. So I was able to talk to her mom, and I got this girl. Training in a local martial arts school. So. What it is basically. I, the 503 is just about to be up and running and set. It happened so fast, everything happened. So in the beginning, it's just like, alright, kids in my area who were bullied, who. Can't quite afford jujitsu, I give them free training, I sponsor them training.

• 2:57:30Speaker 01

  Kids around the country or the world, if I, so I'll post a video, hey, help me find this. This is the beauty of social media, right? How could I find these kids without social media? Within six hours of posting these kids, I'm able to get in touch with their parents. And then I'm able to. Reach out to them, talk to a local school, school owner, reach out to the school owner, get that kid involved. If that school cannot. Afford to give that kid six months free training, we'll sponsor that, right? If they can't afford, we're very thankful. They're taking on that. I post them, I talk about them, I, you know, I give them a little bit of limelight, not that they're doing it for that reason, but they deserve it, right? Because they deserve it because they're inspiring other people to do it.

• 2:58:08Speaker 01

  And uh, it's helped so many kids, uh, because it's giving them the benefits of martial arts, but not only learning how to defend themselves, it's giving them a community and helping. It's helping them to see like they are loved, there is people who accept them. No matter, like a mother, I don't, there was a video of a little, there was a teenage boy, he. He loves Spider-Man. And a bunch of kids tricked him and said, oh yeah, we're gonna, we're gonna dress up as superheroes, come, come to the park. Dress as Spider-Man. He came to Spider, he came to the park all excited, dressed as Spider-Man, and everybody just pointed and laughed at him. And a girl went and she smashed his face in and broke his nose. Right? Ha ha, so funny. Like, where do you find the pleasure in this? Like, oh, hurt people, hurt people. I don't understand that. A lot of people say, oh, but you know, you should help the bullies. I'm not.

• 2:58:54Speaker 01

  They're emotionally yet to want to help bullies. I don't like them because I suffered a lot. That never made me want to make other people feel bad. How you could hurt an innocent person is beyond me. When my bullying stopped is when I took a rock and I bashed in his ear. That's when it stopped. No amount of talking and begging stopped him. So I talked to the mother the other day. And that kid's doing fantastic now. He's doing his first competition. It's so great to hear that they're doing so much better and they have a new community.

• 2:59:28Jocko Willink?

  I just gotta say this, that's changing a human being's life.

• 2:59:31Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:59:32Jocko Willink?

  It's changing a human being's life.

• 2:59:33Speaker 01

  Yes, and they're realizing like, man, like the problem is in school, like, school is such a small part of a child's life, but it's all they know. So if they just realize like, listen, these idiots in school who are bullying you, you're gonna be around them a few years, but there's a whole nother group of people that love and appreciate you, that you have, that you can rely on. And they're getting that through this organization. And it's just an amazing, incredible thing, you know, and I'm so, that is my purpose for sure, to help these kids. Like, I found my reason, my why, is to help these kids, you know? And it's a beautiful thing, man.

• 3:00:05Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, well, I, I guess I almost get made fun of at some points because when people tell me what kind of problems they're going through in life, I'm always like, oh, you know, step one, start training jiu-jitsu. Like, someone just asked us a question the other day and he's like, and you don't need to tell me to train jiu-jitsu because I'm already training jiu-jitsu. But with kids, like, all the time, you know, get the kid, people ask me, kid's getting bullied, kid's getting picked on, kid doesn't have confidence, kid is overconfident, like, all those problems that kids have, yep, train jiu-jitsu, train jiu-jitsu, train jiu-jitsu, train jiu-jitsu. So the fact that you've taken it upon yourself and this organization to set up to, to get kids to train jiu-jitsu is just, it's just outstanding. And like, that one story you just told about that kid,

• 3:00:46Jocko Willink?

  that's now training jiu-jitsu, that's doing his first competition, his entire life is on a different trajectory now. An infinitely better trajectory.

• 3:00:54Speaker 01

  Completely.

• 3:00:55Jocko Willink?

  So doing that over and over again is just gonna be, it's gonna have an impact all over the place. And so if people want to support that, buddiesoverbullies.org, that's where they go.

• 3:01:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, reach out to me on Instagram. You know, if you have a problem, you know, if you know a child was being bullied, do your best, right? Attention, I'll do my best to get to it. Just bear with me because right now it's only me working for it. That is trying to do all that I could do. And there's a lot of other things that I'm juggling as well. And as far as Jiu Jitsu, even if you're not a Jiu Jitsu guy or girl listening to this, which you probably are, you got to understand, you know, there's certain instructors out there. Oh, Jiu Jitsu is not for everyone. That's crap, man. Jiu Jitsu truly is for everyone. You could be a middle aged mom. What are you looking for? For goal setting, weight loss, self-defense, competition, friendship? You just are faced with adversity on the mats in a positive way, right?

• 3:01:47Speaker 01

  To where you will become a better husband, a better wife, a better brother, a better sister, a better friend. You're just becoming a better human being overall. And like, here's the thing, when I first started Jiu Jitsu, I just wanted to compete, compete, compete. I don't need, I can't even train hard anymore because I need new shoulders, but I find a new love in teaching. You know, your, your goals change as you grow, right? So you will find, you know, your niche in Jiu Jitsu and, and why, is it called niche or niche?

• 3:02:16Jocko Willink?

  Niche.

• 3:02:16Speaker 01

  Niche. I think that's the first time I've ever said niche the correct way.

• 3:02:20Jocko Willink?

  We got to document it here big time.

• 3:02:21Speaker 01

  For, for a long time, the funny thing is, one thing I was saying for a long time, I was saying, you know, you do this, it's gonna come into fruitation. Instead of fruition, right? And I've said to my students for like six months and none of my students have the balls to tell me, it's not fruitation, it's fruition.

• 3:02:39Jocko Willink?

  What you just said about like, Jiu Jitsu for everybody and like with, with, with a family. Your, your family should do Jiu Jitsu. Look, I'm gonna say it. Like you, you met, you just met one of my daughters. I got four kids. All my kids do Jiu Jitsu or wrestle or train. They all do it. My wife trains, like. She doesn't train much anymore. She had four kids. She was pretty busy, but she trained hardcore back, back in the day. I mean, and guess what? When like, when we talk. We can talk about jujitsu. It's a common like thing in the family of like, how was your training? Did you train today? What did you train? What'd you learn? What'd you work on?

• 3:03:19Jocko Willink?

  What about this move? And by the way, when like I send a meme to my family about like, oh, you know, oh, you don't want to date this guy. We just saw him pull guard or whatever. Like the whole family gets it, right? There's a common theme there. So, yeah, and you can talk about it and you could do it. You can train.

• 3:03:40Speaker 01

  And there's so many different aspects of it. Like, one of my good friends now, we developed a relationship. He went to one of my affiliates. He thought it was my school and it was my affiliate in Kentucky, Tom Hardy. And the crazy thing is, my best friend, who was, you know, he wrote him, he was a one percenter, he just died. Tom Hardy was filming the film, The Bike Riders, it was about the first one percenters. It was so crazy, the coincidence. But he's obsessed with jujitsu, obsessed with jujitsu. He finds so many parallels between jujitsu and life, and jujitsu and acting. And it's like, when you could get people that are very successful in their own right, being obsessed with jujitsu, and they feel that it could help them become a better

• 3:04:22Speaker 01

  person, how could anyone say that it can't help them, right? There's so many aspects to it, man, that just make you a better human. There really is. And you just have to understand, like, there's two things. Some people say you can have no ego, but at the same time, your ego could also help you. If your ego could help you get back to class the next day after you have a tough day. Your ego can't help you from not, you don't want it to make you get your arm broke, right? You gotta understand, in training, there's no winning or losing in training. There's just learning in training. But for me, the reason, one of the reasons I continue to show up in the match every day is my ego. I refuse to not show up because I know there's other people that are showing up. My ego gets me there.

• 3:05:04Jocko Willink?

  You gotta stay on that bus.

• 3:05:05Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 3:05:06Jocko Willink?

  That bus, man. The bus is moving. If you get on the bus, bro, it's going down the bus.

• 3:05:10Speaker 01

  You know, it's gonna bring us up when you were mentioning to social media, and like, there's good aspects and there's bad aspects. And somebody asked me a question about this, as a matter of fact, at the camp. Somebody asked me about like, well, what about with social media? Is it good or bad? And I said, it's like fire, right? Fire can heat your house.

• 3:05:25Jocko Willink?

  It's good. They can burn it down. Social media, you can connect, you can help bullies, you can save people, you connect with people, or you can freaking waste your life. Same thing with ego. Like, yeah, can your ego be out of control? And now, your ego can be so big that you don't get on the mat.

• 3:05:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:05:40Jocko Willink?

  Or your ego can be so big that you get your arm broken for no reason. So you don't want to go to that extreme. Your ego can also be so small that you don't have the confidence to go on the mat.

• 3:05:50Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 3:05:51Jocko Willink?

  So everything-

• 3:05:52Speaker 01

  It's a happy medium.

• 3:05:53Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you gotta, you gotta find that balance. You recently came out of retirement, I think it was this weekend. You came out of retirement, had another fight, right?

• 3:06:03Speaker 01

  Man, that was incredible.

• 3:06:04Jocko Willink?

  Freaking cool. That was one of the coolest things I've seen, man.

• 3:06:06Speaker 01

  I saw that on the internet as well. It was a man with Down Syndrome, and he has Alzheimer's, okay? And he was talking to his sister, he said, "Jessica, why? Why did Jesus make me this way?" She's, "What do you mean?" She's, "Why did he make me? In, in school, everyone would call me retarded." And she's like, "I know," but she's like, "Marky, that was years ago." He goes, "Yeah, but I still remember it. And I just wanted to be a wrestler. But why did he have to make me this way?" And I was like, "Oh, it broke my heart." And I was like, "You know what? I'm not a WWE wrestler, but I am a jiu-jitsu guy, so let's give this guy a match," you know? The funny thing is, leading up into this match, I'm looking at his videos, and he's like, chest slapping and punching. And I told his sister, "Listen, you know this is a grappling match, right? Like, I'm not gonna get hit with a chair over

• 3:06:51Speaker 01

  my head." So, we went into the match finally, he prepared-

• 3:06:55Jocko Willink?

  And you did it, you did it at a big event.

• 3:06:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, Men of War. It's on a stage. It's, it's a really great event. It's a local event. Excuse me, sorry. And I, I reached out to them. I said, "Guys, I want to give you this opportunity to host this, because it's gonna bring a lot of eyes to, to your arena as well." And he trained for like, two months with Black Hole, Connecticut. And they, they did their best to help him get ready. And we did the face-off, and apparently all he was talking about was winning that belt. And they had a belt, they got a belt prepared for him. So, we went in the match. He took me down with a single. I stood back up. I wanted him to work for it, you know? But, man, he danced out to the ring, and he was ready. When he finally tapped me-

• 3:07:43Speaker 01

  I looked up and his face was just, he just stared at me and I'm like, oh, this isn't going the way I expected it to go. Like, he's not excited. And then immediately, he just put his hands over his face and started crying. And I started crying. And the problem was, I didn't think I could stop it. I was like, God, get it together right now. And like, literally, this was the best night of this dude's life. And it took minimal effort. All we had to do was post about it and then show up and give him the opportunity to do it. You know, and it was just so incredible. And that's the power of social media, right? It made me connect with him. This dude was a superstar. I've never been so happy to lose in my life. You know, it was incredible.

• 3:08:21Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that was, that was amazing to watch, to see, to see you pull that off. And so then, you also got, obviously you got Ocean County BJJ. That's, that's your, your headquarters academy. But then you have this affiliate program where people, what is it, if I was one of your affiliates, what would I get out of that?

• 3:08:38Speaker 01

  So basically, you get to talk to me. I'm, I'm talking in the group chat where we have a big group chat that I'm in every single day. Anything you need, you can reach out to me. I get back to you immediately. I don't force you to wear my gis. I don't force you to wear my uniforms, but you can include my logo. You can use it. I don't force you to, the, one of the beauties of opening your own jiu-jitsu school is doing it the way you want to do it, right? So, I don't force you to teach a certain curriculum, but I do allow you to come to my academy, see how we do things, ask how to do things. And you could do things the same exact way as I do. I, I basically, I give you the choice. You could use my logos, you could use my name. You could, you, you could reach out to any of us and take what you want.

• 3:09:22Speaker 01

  And if you just want to say you're part of the association and really not use what we're using, okay, you could do that as well. I do recommend that you try to take as much knowledge as you can. I don't give you a set curriculum because what I charge a month is so cheap. If I were to just give you my entire curriculum, there's a two, there's a few things wrong with that. Number one, You're not thinking for yourself. I want you to be a critical thinker. I want you to be your own person, your own school owner. Number two, if I was to do that, I would have to charge significantly a lot more money. I charge my affiliates 250 a month. But I have some affiliates, like one in Philippines, it's a charity affiliate. They don't pay at all.

• 3:10:01Speaker 01

  I have another guy in South Africa. He's not paying yet because I don't have enough students yet. Like I never had an affiliation to make money. Money is always a consequence, I feel, of doing the right thing. We do have a lot of affiliates now, like 63 to 65, and every single person who's in that affiliation could tell you, like, I am at their beck and call when they need me. I had one guy, I love him to death, he was messaging me privately every day, and I said, "Brother, do me a favor." I said, "Let's keep it in the affiliate chat, right? Because any question that you have, I'm sure everybody also has, right? So it's hard for me to speak to every single person individually, unless it's like a huge problem. I'll definitely make time for them. But I am in the group chat, sharing things, showing things, answering any questions. If they have any technical questions,

• 3:10:45Speaker 01

  for sure, do it. And they're always able to come to my academy and visit. And we have a lot of my affiliations, my affiliates. And also, any of their students can come to my academy and train for no mat fee, as much as they want. How do you vet the people that are going to be affiliates? That's a good question. So I basically talk to them. I want to know what they're... There's a series of questions that they gotta answer. What is their reason for Jiu-Jitsu? What lineage do they come from? What happened with your previous lineage? Are you in trouble before? I do gotta start doing background checks for sure. I haven't yet. I've taken their word, and I haven't had any issues.

• 3:11:26Speaker 01

  But there has been some people that I've turned away, that when they tried to come to me, they had a lot of negative things to say about their previous affiliation. And I didn't think that it was solely the affiliation's fault. I think usually there's three ways, three sides to every story. And if the person can't see their issue at all, most likely history will repeat itself with me. You know, you can't please everyone. So there have been some people I said, "Hey, you know, I don't think so." There have been some blue belts that wanted to open under me. I said, "No, you know, not a blue belt yet. Let's get your purple belt, and then you could kind of like get your foot in the door. Preferably, I want you to be a higher belt, of course. A black belt, preferably, or a brown belt." I have some brown belts that are on their way to a black belt.

• 3:12:08Speaker 01

  But I'm pretty cut and dry. Like if you put the time in, once you're a part of my affiliation, if you show up and I see you at my school and you've been training for, you know, if you're four years as a brown belt, you're gonna get your black belt, right? Like if you're five years, like I have a guy that I'm gonna be promoting to brown belt soon. He's in my affiliation. He's been with me for over a year, trained with me like 10 times, visited me already, and he's been a purple belt for six years. So he's gonna get his brown belt very, very soon. So I'm a, like, I don't have any contract with BJJ Fanatics. It was just a handshake. Nothing was ever written. So I'm that kind of guy still. Maybe I need to get out of that. Danielle's the one who made the contracts for my affiliation, because I never had them. I don't believe, like, I don't know, like, if you tell me you're gonna do something, I wanna take your word that you're gonna do it, you know?

• 3:12:52Speaker 01

  But also, at the same time, it's a different day and age, you know? So I do feel I have a pretty good judge of character when I talk to people. So I do, I have direct contact with every single person who wants to be an affiliate. I have to talk to them. I have to hear them. I have to know what they, and what I do is I have them download WhatsApp, because a lot of times on the, on the phone, if you say something, people forget you say it. I want everything, a record of everything. Everything you say, you said this at this time then. I said this then. Don't tell me I didn't say it. I already told you. I learned that lesson a long time ago. So it's growing significantly all the time.

• 3:13:28Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, so if people wanna get to that, it's tomdeblast.com and you can get all the stuff. And you do seminars, you got the book, obviously. What else? Does that get us up to speed? With what we got going on in the Tom DeBlass world?

• 3:13:42Speaker 01

  I announced for 1FC. I announced grappling matches.

• 3:13:46Jocko Willink?

  Oh, that's right. That's right. And we just, speaking of Danielle Kelly, I was listening to you announce her freaking awesome win.

• 3:13:53Speaker 01

  That was a great win, man. She played the rules so well. That's what people, I talked to Jessica before the match and she's like, I was like, did you start working the cage yet? She's like, I'll do it closer to the match. And it was two weeks away from the competition. I was like, what do you mean closer to the match? She'd been doing this for two months already, you know? But Danielle plays that rule set really, really well.

• 3:14:11Jocko Willink?

  Man, Danielle, the, I think it was the match before, the girl was trying to do the can opener to her? And Danielle just like starts working, she starts to move, her hips start to move and next thing you know she freaking goes to the girl's back. And I was like, hell yeah Danielle Kelly gets on. She's freaking outstanding. Uh, so you're doing that, um, what else? Anything else, anything else we need to know about?

• 3:14:33Speaker 01

  Nah, I think that's it, you know, if you guys need me, find me. Uh, you could actually just email me at Tom the Blast at Gmail. If you're interested in affiliation, just put affiliation in capital letters. My name at Gmail, easy enough. And, uh, yeah, that's it, man. I really appreciate you, you having me here.

• 3:14:49Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, man. I mean, you, just so everyone knows, you're on the interwebs, uh, Ocean County BJJ.com is your, is your school. Uh, TomTheBlast.com leads to a bunch of this stuff. BuddiesOverBullies.org. I think this is a freaking outstanding organization. Uh, you're on Instagram and you're on Instagram too. Like you, you don't, you don't post in ghosts, bro. You post and get in there. You're ready to scrap, bro. You're ready to get in the game with Tom the Blast. Everything I said about like the, no, don't get, don't read the comments. Tom the Blast be reading the comments.

• 3:15:23Speaker 01

  And not only that, I, I calmed down significantly after the pandemic. I was like heavily, people say they're shadow banned. No, no, you couldn't even search my name for nine months, right? Like you couldn't find me for nine months. I went to like, uh, you know, like 10 million reach a month to like 20,000, right? Because I was, I was going hard at people, bro. Like, uh, and now I don't do that anymore. I, I can't, you know, I can't. Uh, because you know what it is, people, the perfect example, somebody said something to me like I, during the pandemic, like I hope your kids get COVID and die. Right? And I went hard on this person. The person deleted their comment and screenshotted what I wrote. They posted on the internet. Like I just went at him for no reason, for no reason. Oh, this is the true Tom the Blast. Come on, bro. So I, you know, you can't get people.

• 3:16:07Jocko Willink?

  Did you threaten their lives? What'd you do?

• 3:16:09Speaker 01

  I've gotten people's IP addresses. I've

• 3:16:13Jocko Willink?

  Oh, you're going that far?

• 3:16:14Speaker 01

  I've doxed people before. I've done crazy stuff, but like, but I didn't realize, but like, one guy was ripping my DVDs. He was, he was pirating my DVDs and this is a few years ago. So I found out, I got guys that could like, to find crazy stuff, like my, some of my friends. And I posted like his, his, his full name. I'm like, if you're gonna steal from me, people should know who you are.

• 3:16:36Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I mean, you can expect that, right?

• 3:16:38Speaker 01

  So down upon that I, I, I doxed him. I didn't know anything about that. But so many people were offended. Like, he's stealing from me, but I'm wrong for doxing him.

• 3:16:46Jocko Willink?

  Echo, what's your judgment?

• 3:16:48Speaker 02

  On?

• 3:16:49Jocko Willink?

  Like, okay, if somebody steals from you, so this guy stole from Tom.

• 3:16:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:16:54Jocko Willink?

  And he doxed him.

• 3:16:55Speaker 02

  Yeah. So what is dox exactly?

• 3:16:57Jocko Willink?

  Oh, I thought you were like a pro in this. That's when you say on the internet, like, hey, there's this person's name and address.

• 3:17:02Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, yeah. Cause they stole from me.

• 3:17:03Jocko Willink?

  That's doxing. And the thing is, it's really like a big deal in the world.

• 3:17:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:17:07Jocko Willink?

  And what's weird about it, it's a big deal because it taking the virtual world and bringing it into reality.

• 3:17:13Speaker 02

  It makes you face reality.

• 3:17:14Jocko Willink?

  It makes the whole, everybody that's a shit talker on the gram or wherever else. It's like, they're, they, that's like a huge violation. It'd be like if we're doing jujitsu and I start punching you, right? It's like that type of thing. But here's the thing. What did that person do that's, that they're getting punched now? Right? Like, it's like

• 3:17:32Speaker 02

  There has to be consequence.

• 3:17:33Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:17:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, I guess, right? For stealing from you. And then there's, I guess, there's a bunch of levels of stealing, right? So the, well, they pirated your stuff.

• 3:17:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:17:43Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, the way I see it, yeah, if you steal from someone and they dox you, hey, that's the way the world works.

• 3:17:49Speaker 01

  What would you want better? Would you rather me go to your house and drag you out? Or just me write your, you know, dox you? Now, here's the thing. I always, I'm known for all the time. I get my school address. Like now when people talk trash, I'm just like, three, three, six, Lacey.

• 3:18:02Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah. I've seen you do this a bunch of times. Yeah. I was gonna bring that up. We were talking about the comments. Someone will be like, I'll beat your ass. You're like, here's my address. Where you at?

• 3:18:10Speaker 02

  Send location.

• 3:18:10Speaker 01

  Let's do it. Let's do it. You know, and, and I always say now, I'm very, I'm like, listen, if you wanna come and talk, we could talk. If you wanna come and fight, we could fight. Whatever you wanna do, we could do. You know, and it just you can't win with these people. So I don't dox people anymore. I really don't get into it anymore. I don't look, I didn't look for the IP addresses anymore. Like I didn't look for the IP address of the guy who made, threw the frisbee with my, my dead dad. I'd let him go.

• 3:18:33Jocko Willink?

  For now. Uh, so there you are. You're on Instagram. You're, you have Twitter. I haven't, I looked at your Twitter.

• 3:18:39Speaker 01

  I, I, I don't post on Twitter. I, there's like somebody who has my name on Twitter, but it's not me. I'm on threads, that Instagram thing.

• 3:18:49Jocko Willink?

  And you're at Tom DeBlass Jiu Jitsu as well, um, on YouTube. So you got a little YouTube channel.

• 3:18:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't post there either. Best thing is Instagram. Instagram and threads. I'll, I'll check threads every once in a while. Instagram, I'm always on, always.

• 3:19:00Jocko Willink?

  So that's where Tom DeBlass is at. Echo Charles, you got any questions?

• 3:19:05Speaker 02

  Is it a question? Yeah. Oh, okay. Yeah, it's a question. So the, I, I found out why you get so mad at the people on the internet. And I'm on that. I'm gonna ask you, tell me if you think this is accurate.

• 3:19:16Jocko Willink?

  So wait, wait, you have a hypothesis? Cause you just said, I found out why.

• 3:19:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yes. Correction. My hypothesis. Tell me what you think about this. Instagram crowd is just the Instagram crowd. And then there's varying levels of behavior. So some people are just, some people, they'll just be like, hey, anything Tom posts, I just love it. Everything. I don't care. I don't even know if I agree. I never thought about that, but I love it. Yep. Tom, hell yeah. Like, like, like, love, right? Then there's people on the other side, no matter what, no matter what you post, ah, it's, uh, I don't know, something negative. It's always gonna be negative. I don't like, yeah, exactly right. If you truly believe like, okay, there are people like this, there are people like this and everywhere in between. If I don't know them personally, it doesn't matter. It's actually just internet characters. If you truly believe that, it's hard to get bothered by it.

• 3:20:04Speaker 01

  That seems, my hypothesis is you've created this in order for you not to get annoyed with these human beings. And I like it. I do like it.

• 3:20:12Speaker 02

  Yeah. No, that, oh, that's, that's your response to my, my hypothesis?

• 3:20:17Jocko Willink?

  I will, I will definitely do the same thing, similar, oh, it's a bot. It's like, it's a bot. Who cares? Like, this is just.

• 3:20:23Speaker 01

  That's how you gotta, you really gotta look at it. Cause there's no rhyme or reason.

• 3:20:25Speaker 02

  In a way, it is that. It's not an actual bot, like a computer bot, but in a way it is. You don't know each other. It's not like. They're in no position to have an opinion about you on a personal level and you're in no position to evaluate that opinion.

• 3:20:40Speaker 01

  And I think one of the biggest problems that I've always had with everybody is like when I see somebody.

• 3:20:45Jocko Willink?

  You have a problem with everybody.

• 3:20:47Speaker 02

  Millions of fathers.

• 3:20:50Speaker 01

  When I see people with extreme talent, like talent is very common, right, that don't utilize that talent, that drives me insane. And but, you know, I gotta remember, like, you know, people will tell me like, listen, not everybody's gonna have the same work ethic. But for me, it's like, how could you not have a certain code that you live by? How could you not like want to be the best dude that you can be? How could you not see common sense? And perhaps that's a little bit of narcissism on my end to think that everybody should believe like me because they shouldn't. But it's for me, it's like, all right, if you're a man and you're on the internet talking trash to somebody you don't know, you're definitely not at a high level in your life in any aspect. And don't you want to be?

• 3:21:35Speaker 01

  Don't you want to be? You know, if you're a kid with talent and you.

• 3:21:39Jocko Willink?

  You're not mad at them, you're disappointed in them.

• 3:21:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, like I actually know them. I don't know these people. You know, it's like, you know, people who run from problems, people who start problems behind a fake name, it's hard for me to respect a certain kind of individuals, you know? I was talking to my students about this the other day. Two of my students went through the same exact thing, same exact thing. They messed up heavily. They messed up big time and they got torn into. And one of the students ran because they didn't want to face their problems and the other student raised up and became better. Which one are you gonna be? You know, it's very easy to run, run, but if you keep running from all your problems, eventually you're gonna find you're gonna be very lonely in a box with nothing around you because life is about making mistakes. You're gonna fail and you're gonna succeed. You're gonna fail.

• 3:22:26Speaker 01

  You're gonna get knocked down. Are you gonna get up? Or what are you gonna do? You're gonna run. You know what I mean? So it's hard for me to respect people who constantly never want to admit their faults, never want to admit that they're wrong and just, and I don't like people who don't like me.

• 3:22:43Speaker 01

  You're a good man. Thank you, brother. Book the good work. Appreciate you.

• 3:22:46Jocko Willink?

  Tom, any, any closing thoughts, bro?

• 3:22:48Speaker 01

  I, I really appreciate you guys for having me on here. Thank you. I love all that you do. Means a lot to me. I said for a while, uh, Jocko is the real deal. Not that he needs anyone to tell him that, but I don't respect, I respect everyone, but I don't, I don't know the proper word. Uh, admire many people. Definitely admire you, man. It's, it's very hard to live like you live. Uh, it's very hard to keep up the discipline that you keep up. And, uh, you know, I hope everybody understands that. Listen, I, I, I make mistakes. I know that. Love me or hate me, just know my intentions are, they're pure. So if I could ever help you in any way, I hope I, I hope I do. All right. So thank you, everybody for tuning in. Check out my sponsor, Pitbull USA.

• 3:23:31Speaker 01

  Great people. Check out my school, uh, listen to the Jocko podcast, buy it. The, the malt shake is quite delicious. To be quite honest, I'm not, I could drink this just as a snack.

• 3:23:42Jocko Willink?

  Believe me, you're not the only one in this room that drinks that as a snack right there.

• 3:23:46Speaker 01

  Incredible. A good snack to have.

• 3:23:49Jocko Willink?

  Indeed, man. Well, thanks for joining us. Uh, I, I'm sorry it took a while to get, make all this happen, but actually it's, it's taken a lot longer for some other people. So I'm glad we finally got it set up and thanks for, thanks for sharing what you've been through, your experiences on and off the mat, the lessons that you've learned and, and really what you're doing right now. You know, want to talk about making an impact. Like I said, you've already made an impact on one kid. You've changed the trajectory of their life and you're going to do that over and over again. I know there's many more on the list already. So thanks for what you're doing to help kids of all ages, and I mean of all ages, that's two to, two to just 82. Um, help them overcome what they're facing, getting bullied, getting abused. You're making a difference and, um, we're grateful. So thank you.

• 3:24:32Speaker 01

  Thank you, guys. Appreciate you.

• 3:24:35Jocko Willink?

  And with that, Tom deBlass has left the building for now. We're about to go do a seminar with Tom deBlass here in a little bit. So that's awesome. Obviously, Jiu Jitsu, man, what a huge piece of his life. But you know, that that story that he told about the kid that got picked on. And I've, you know, I follow Tom on Instagram. So I kind of see this stuff as happening. But I didn't know the follow up like the kid that dressed up like Spiderman and got made fun of and all this stuff. He's doing his first Jiu Jitsu tournament.

• 3:25:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:25:08Jocko Willink?

  You and I both know what it takes to do a Jiu Jitsu tournament.

• 3:25:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:25:14Jocko Willink?

  Like, if you're a 15 year old, or a 13 year old, or a 10 year old, or a 48 year old, and you're going to do a Jiu Jitsu tournament. That is such a huge step in your life.

• 3:25:25Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 3:25:26Jocko Willink?

  It's gonna, you're gonna overcome so much. You're gonna, it's just gonna be a life changing experience.

• 3:25:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:25:32Jocko Willink?

  It's gonna make you so much better. And here's a kid that was not on that path. That's now on that Jiu Jitsu path.

• 3:25:38Speaker 02

  It's true. Like you, to do, to decide to do a tournament, is like, you have to kind of embrace Jiu Jitsu in a way that, you know, that it's gonna take some, some mental strength. I'm not saying, is it the hardest thing in the world? No. But I'm just saying, like, there's a difference between someone saying, oh, yeah, I'll just do a Jiu Jitsu class. And that's sort of it.

• 3:25:58Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:25:59Speaker 02

  Versus someone who's like embraces Jiu Jitsu and be like, no, I want to go into a competition.

• 3:26:04Jocko Willink?

  The two different things. The implied thing that I didn't say is like, this is a person that's been bullied.

• 3:26:10Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 3:26:10Jocko Willink?

  That, that may, that's what I should like for a person, look, for a normal person to go do a Jiu Jitsu tournament is a step up. It's out their comfort zone. It's like they're, they're face to face with someone. They're gonna win or lose in front of people. Like, there's a lot going on there. But now you have someone that's been bullied. And they're made that whole transition.

• 3:26:32Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 3:26:33Jocko Willink?

  They made that whole transition and now they're going to compete. Like this is a life changing thing.

• 3:26:36Speaker 02

  Oh yeah. Yeah, that's true, huh? Cause you know, on one hand, or at one point, it's like, I'm, I'm being kind of the receiving end of this, you know, this, this hostility and all this stuff in a, in a really a position of inferiority. And on the receiving end, and then yeah, to make the transition all the way down to the, the fact I'm choosing now to go compete. Now I'm superior now. And actually, no, I have to basically put my, myself on the stage to prove whether or not I'm superior. You know, the, the spirit of competition, of course. But just to have that mindset now, bro, that's a, that's a full 180 right there.

• 3:27:11Jocko Willink?

  Full 180. Speaking of 180s, Def Reset. So we, we got this thing, we did it last year. It's like the new year's type thing. Hey, it's a new year's. And you know, I've always said like, hey dude, don't wait till new year's, like start now. But we did this thing last year, it was kind of low profile. So it's basically like, here's the things that you're going to do. You're going to do a hundred burpees or a hundred burpees or 10 minutes worth. You're going to eat clean, you're going to make a list, which is we're going to, you're going to follow a protocol, right? You're going to get on the path. You're going to kind of mandate that you're going to get on the path. Discipline equals freedom, reset. That's, we, so we did it last year. I kind of, you know, cool, I was like stoked, but this is kind of, it's kind of how I, this is sort of a normal life for me.

• 3:27:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:27:56Jocko Willink?

  But it had such a huge impact on so many people when we did it last year. Like people made life changes, like these kind of life changes. And so this year we are going, like trying to get, trying to get it out there. We also got, we made it better. So we got, we, Jason Kalipa, he laid out a bunch of workouts. So we got like health and fitness daily workouts from Jason Kalipa. We got leadership stuff coming from Eshalam Front. We got discipline directives coming from me. We got, you know, it's obviously fueled by Jocko Fuel, but it's coming. There's, I'm going to do a warning order. So the military warning order is like, here's the mission, here's what you're going to be doing, here's what you need to prepare.

• 3:28:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:28:41Jocko Willink?

  So I got that coming, let people know about that Def Reset, where we are going to get the world on the path. That's what we're doing. So stand by for some of that, Jocko Fuel. jockofuel.com check out jockofuel.com to get some good clean stuff in your life to put in your body that's what we're doing we're making the cleanest and best possible supplements that we can make we got everything from a beverage that you can drink that will give you energy now look some people call that an energy drink but I don't want you to think of something with 400 milligrams of caffeine I don't want you to think of something with sucralose and other artificial sweeteners that are bad for you I don't want you to think of something with a bunch of chemical preservatives that are bad for you I don't

• 3:29:24Jocko Willink?

  want you to think about any of that because none of that's in there it's good clean energy Molk you just heard you just heard Tom talking about that Molk he's like maybe I'll have this as dessert exactly yes you will I'm about to have one for dessert so jocko fuel hydration greens get the greens and you know what else get the creatine just get on the creatine

• 3:29:50Speaker 02

  sure the creatine

• 3:29:52Jocko Willink?

  get on the creatine

• 3:29:53Speaker 02

  daily get your daily dose of creatine it'll help

• 3:29:56Jocko Willink?

  it's gonna do all that for you so jockofuel.com check it out also you can get it in stores you know giga wawa vitamin shop GNC military commissaries Afees Hannaford Dash stores Wake Fern Shop Right HEB down in Tejas is getting it on Meyer up in the Midwest is getting it on Harris Teeter Lifetime Fitness Shields and look if you belong to a gym tell your gym owner that you want to have a jocko fuel there so you can take what you got from the gym and enhance it with your fuel have them email [email protected] there you go that's what we're doing also we got origin USA we make stuff in America look apparently

• 3:30:39Jocko Willink?

  we're training jujitsu highly recommend it's beyond highly recommended what's the next step beyond highly recommended mandated

• 3:30:47Speaker 02

  demanded

• 3:30:47Jocko Willink?

  mandated mandated look I don't believe in mandates I don't believe in imposing my way on your way

• 3:30:56Speaker 02

  what about insisting respectfully insisting

• 3:30:59Jocko Willink?

  here's the thing in the Navy there's a whole like hierarchy of words and one of the if someone's recommending like let's say you put in for an officer package and I think you're okay I would write like I recommend Echo for this program. That means don't, don't take him.

• 3:31:16Speaker 02

  Would recommend.

• 3:31:17Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And then it's like, the next one up is, I strongly recommend. And people are still, you know, he's an okay. And then it's like, I give the strongest recommendation. And the highest thing that I knew of was I give my strongest possible personal recommendation.

• 3:31:36Speaker 02

  Sweet.

• 3:31:38Jocko Willink?

  So I'm gonna give my strongest possible personal recommendation that you start training jiu-jitsu out there, people.

• 3:31:43Speaker 02

  Understand.

• 3:31:45Jocko Willink?

  And when you start training jiu-jitsu, you're gonna need a rash guard. You're gonna need a gi. So go to originusa.com and get yourself your jiu-jitsu stuff that's made in America. That's what we're doing. We're making it in America. It's not made in a sweatshop by slave labor. It's not made by a 12-year-old that's making a dollar a week to breathe in chemicals. And the chemicals that they don't breathe in and ingest themselves are getting dumped into the ocean. That's not what we're doing. Made in America, originusa.com. Get your gear there. Hunt gear. Delta jeans, boots, t-shirts, joggers. I didn't really understand the jogger thing. That's a thing, though.

• 3:32:20Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 3:32:22Jocko Willink?

  People be wearing the joggers.

• 3:32:23Speaker 02

  They do.

• 3:32:23Jocko Willink?

  We, we make some like, I don't know what to call them, sweatpants. Is there a difference between sweatpants and joggers?

• 3:32:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:32:29Jocko Willink?

  What's the difference?

• 3:32:30Speaker 02

  The fit, the cut.

• 3:32:32Jocko Willink?

  The cut of sweatpants is baggier.

• 3:32:34Speaker 02

  Baggier, yeah. More tradish, more traditional cut. You know, joggers is like.

• 3:32:39Jocko Willink?

  We have something that's more towards sweatpants. Feel more, a little bit more like Rocky Balboa.

• 3:32:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, I could see that. Rocky Balboa is definitely.

• 3:32:47Jocko Willink?

  Joggers.

• 3:32:48Speaker 02

  Joggers for the joggers.

• 3:32:50Jocko Willink?

  Uh, originusa.com. Get what you need there.

• 3:32:52Speaker 02

  True. Also, Jocko's store. Discipline equals freedom. Shirts, we representing on this path that we're all on or about to get back on. Whatever your past scenario may be, you wanna represent, just go to jacostore.com, choose what you want, boom, get something. Also, what's available on Jocko's store if you don't know. It's called the Shirt Locker. New design shirts, T-shirts, new design every month. People seem to like them. They're a little bit more outside the, I paint outside the lines a little bit on them every once in a while. But people seem to like them. It's a new design every month. Like I said, subscription scenario. Anyway, it's on Jocko's store. It's called the Shirt Locker. Sign up for that if you want. Check it out.

• 3:33:27Jocko Willink?

  That's what it's called. Check it out. If you need some steak to go with your Molk, which you probably do, go to primalbeef.com or go to coloradocraftbeef.com. Get yourself some good steaks from some good people. That's what we're doing. Check them out. Also subscribe to the podcast. Check out Jocko Unraveling. Check out the Grounded Podcast. Check out jockounderground.com. I just said Grounded Podcast. We haven't done that in like five years.

• 3:33:55Speaker 02

  I think it's on hiatus.

• 3:33:58Jocko Willink?

  It's on a long hiatus. We'll have to watch out for that one. jockounderground.com. We did just cut one of those. What was that? Yesterday?

• 3:34:06Speaker 02

  Or did before.

• 3:34:07Jocko Willink?

  Just came out. So check that out as well. It's $8.18 a month. If you can afford, if you can't afford it, it's no big deal. Email [email protected] so we can bring you into the underground world where we have control. Watch out. YouTube. Check out our YouTube. Check out Psychological Warfare, Flipside Canvas. Check out a bunch of books. Obviously, How You Bear It by Tom deBlass. And then I've written a bunch of books, so check those out as well. Including the kids book, Way of the Warrior Kid. Get some kids around. Get the kid in your neighborhood on the path. That's another thing. Like that kid training jiu-jitsu for the first time and going to compete, that's a life changer. I've had countless people tell me that the Warrior Kid books changed the trajectory of a kid's life.

• 3:34:52Jocko Willink?

  So get those books for your kids. Also, Echelon Front, we have a leadership consultancy. We solve problems through leadership. Go to echelonfront.com for details.

• 3:35:02Jocko Willink?

  We also have an online training platform to learn about life, to learn about life, leadership in life. That's what life is. You lead yourself, you lead your team, you lead your family, you lead your friends. Life is leadership and it is a skill that you can learn, just like jujitsu is a skill that you can learn. And just like you have a huge advantage and almost unmatchable advantage on the mats, if you know jujitsu and someone else doesn't, it's the same thing when you have skills, life skills, leadership skills. Go to extremeownership.com, train and study so you are prepared for the mats of life.

• 3:35:46Jocko Willink?

  That's what I'm asking. Also, if you want to help service members, active and retired, go check out Mark Lee's mom, Mama Lee. She's got a charity organization. If you want to donate or you want to get involved, go to AmericasMightyWarriors.org. Don't forget about Mike. I think he's got HeroesAndHorses.org. Jimmy May has got BeyondTheBrotherhood.org. And of course, you heard about it today, Tom DeBlass has BuddiesOverBullies.org. Check that out and let's help kids get on a path in life that is going to help them for eternity. That's what we're doing. If you want to connect with us on the interwebs, Tom is there, Ocean

• 3:36:27Jocko Willink?

  County BJJ.com, TomDeBlast.com, BuddiesOverBullies.org. He's on the gram primarily and he will engage. So just stand by. That's at Tom DeBlass and then Echo is at Echo Charles. I am at Jocko Willink. Just be careful because the algorithm is training right now. It's like in, it's in training. It's learning, like it's watching you and it's learning how it can beat you. So you gotta be on guard. Otherwise it might take you down and choke you out. You don't want that. And thanks to those of you in uniform right now around the world, these are tenuous times and you all stand on the front lines, ready to defend freedom and our

• 3:37:08Jocko Willink?

  way of life and we are thankful for it. Same goes to our police, law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, border patrol, secret service, all first responders. Thank you for defending us and keeping us safe here at home. And everyone else out there.

• 3:37:26Jocko Willink?

  You're not gonna have an easy path. That you're not gonna get it. That is the nature of the world and that's the nature of life. You will suffer, you will fall short, you will make mistakes. But if you get back up, if you regroup, recalibrate and reengage, if you keep fighting, in the end, if you bear failures and defeat with courage and tenacity, in the end, you will win.

• 3:37:58Jocko Willink?

  So get back up, dust off, and go get after it. And until next time, this is Echo and Jocko, out.