428: Lift Heavy Things, Move, and Get Enough Protein. With Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

Join >Jocko Underground< https://www.jockounderground.com/subscribe Well-respected board-certified and fellowship-trained physician, Dr. Gabrielle Lyon, is the founder of the Institute for Muscle-Centric Medicine®. Dr. Lyon is a nationally recognized speaker and media contributor specializing in brain and thyroid health, lean body mass support, and longevity. 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 428 with Echo Charles and me, Jocko Willink. Good evening, Echo. Good evening. After a lifetime of dieting, my patient Leila decided she had had enough. A 46-year-old chef who suffered from rheumatoid arthritis that left her fatigued and in pain, Leila weighed 317 pounds when she started treatment with me. The medication she needed to keep her immune system in check, kept packing on pounds and draining her energy, she was close to giving up. My first goal for Leila was to help her move the needle on the scale. To give her the boost of an early win, step one was to get her moving.

• 0:43Jocko Willink?

  She began walking on her lunch break and incorporated three additional 10-minute walks throughout the day. Next, we got Leila started with resistance exercises to assist with quality weight loss that decreased fat tissue without sacrificing muscle. Once we got Leila moving, we focused on her nutrition. We anchored her first and last meals with protein, and she eliminated all snacking. Within seven months, Leila had lost nearly 60 pounds. As exciting and rare as that weight loss was, it wasn't even her biggest accomplishment. She was most proud of the health benefits that flowed once her body composition shifted.

• 1:25Jocko Willink?

  Her joint pain decreased, allowing her to reduce her arthritis medication, her blood markers such as fasting insulin, blood glucose, triglycerides, which can gauge the risk of coronary artery disease, all improved. The most inspiring part of her story, though, was realizing that her body wanted to get stronger. Shocked by her own success, Leila grew less hungry and more encouraged. She could not believe how easy it was for her to feel so much better.

• 1:57Jocko Willink?

  And that right there is an excerpt from a book called Forever Strong, which is written by Dr. Gabrielle Lyon, who studied nutrition and exercise and has helped scores of people change their health. And she wrote, recently wrote this book, which is got all kinds of information in it, much of which, much of this information is contrary to what others recommend. And she's here tonight to share some of that information with us. Gabrielle, thanks for joining us.

• 2:33Speaker 01

  Thank you so much for having me.

• 2:35Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, this is, um, I, I, when I said, when I was, when I was thinking about this, and I was talking about the fact that much of the information in this book is contrary to what others have said. That being said, there has been a ground swell over the last decade that leans certainly more in the direction of what you talk about and advise compared to what it was in the eighties and nineties. Would you agree with that?

• 3:04Speaker 01

  I would. It's slow, though.

• 3:06Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Oh, it's definitely been slow.

• 3:07Speaker 01

  It's slow.

• 3:08Jocko Willink?

  I would say that your focus being very much so, I would say leaning a little bit more into protein and muscle. Like I, I mean, um, that's kind of where I would say you're even a little bit more pro protein and pro muscle, which I am also pro protein. Echo Charles.

• 3:29Speaker 02

  Yes, sir.

• 3:29Jocko Willink?

  Pro protein.

• 3:30Speaker 02

  Confirm.

• 3:30Jocko Willink?

  Pro muscle.

• 3:31Speaker 02

  Yes, sir.

• 3:31Jocko Willink?

  Hundred percent.

• 3:32Speaker 02

  Hundred percent.

• 3:34Jocko Willink?

  So, um, I guess, I guess before we jump into this, or as we get into this, as we get into how you landed there, I kind of wanted to go to the book and just get a little bit of background on you. And you say this in the book, "When I was younger, I obsessed about food and my body weight. I felt hungry all the time and couldn't seem to curb my appetite. I cycled through an array of fad diets, everything from season determined, season determined macrobiotic to all organic sprouted and vegetarian." What's, is sprouted still a thing? Eating the sprouts?

• 4:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 4:06Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 4:06Speaker 02

  Well, then again, yeah.

• 4:07Speaker 01

  Echo, do you, do you read that?

• 4:09Speaker 02

  Oh, no, not on a regular basis. No.

• 4:12Jocko Willink?

  Sprouts is you're literally planting stuff in your kitchen, right? And growing them on your shelf?

• 4:15Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 4:16Jocko Willink?

  Right?

• 4:16Speaker 02

  My father-in-law is down for the sprouts.

• 4:19Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 4:20Speaker 02

  Very cumbersome. I mean, again, it's growing something. Oh, yeah, it's a little micro farm in the house cracking. Oh, yeah.

• 4:26Jocko Willink?

  Um, back to the book. Back then, before I knew better, my meals were heavily skewed toward an unbalanced diet of carbs, often considered healthy, with whole grains like brown rice, barley, millet, oats, oats and corn. I ate locally grown vegetables, beans and bean products like tofu, miso. Am I saying that right? And tempeh. Oh, I have heard of tempeh. And sea vegetables like seaweed, nori and agar. Am I getting those right?

• 4:55Speaker 02

  You are. I'm impressed.

• 4:56Jocko Willink?

  These are things I haven't.

• 4:56Speaker 02

  You're secretly eating these things.

• 4:58Jocko Willink?

  No. Uh, my kids used to eat seaweed.

• 5:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:01Jocko Willink?

  The seaweed from like Trader Joe's, little plastic crunchy crunchy seaweed.

• 5:05Speaker 02

  Nori, nori.

• 5:06Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Is it seaweed? Is seaweed good for you?

• 5:08Speaker 02

  It is.

• 5:09Jocko Willink?

  My kids ate seaweed like crazy. I was chasing after increased energy, health and athletic performance, but all my careful planning was rooted in misinformation. I spent hours of each day on food acquisition, obsessing over every tiny detail to get it right. In quotes. I avoided parties and brought my own snacks. I avoided parties or brought my own snacks. I exercised easily 14 hours a week. My focus on food and exercise was unhealthy largely, largely because I thought meeting a baseline of wellness required a diet and training program demanding that much effort. While my intentions were good, this behavior grounded in my flawed understanding of health devastated my body and mind. After two years, I found myself exhausted and malnourished.

• 5:52Jocko Willink?

  Simply put, I had been unintentionally starving myself of the nutrients I needed. Finally, my body's response to growing deficiencies was to start binge eating. Over time, I developed an incredibly disordered relationship with food that stemmed from my ability to regulate hunger.

• 6:10Jocko Willink?

  All right.

• 6:14Jocko Willink?

  How old were you when all this was going down?

• 6:17Speaker 01

  Eighteen.

• 6:17Jocko Willink?

  Like, so sixteen to eighteen, was this teenage years?

• 6:21Speaker 01

  First two years of college.

• 6:22Jocko Willink?

  First two years of college. So when you were in high school, were you sort of into the food thing as hardcore? When you were in high school, what were you doing? Were you playing sports? Were you, what was going on?

• 6:34Speaker 01

  Dance. Remember the dance team? No. So the drill team. I don't know if you remember that.

• 6:39Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, my, one of my daughters was a ballerina. And so that's a different level of dance. And if you told me that you were very focused on food because of ballet, I'd be like, oh, yes, you were because that is a highly, highly disciplined activity. And it's a little bit, in my opinion, psychotic. Right? It's, did you ever, were you ever around ballerinas?

• 7:02Speaker 01

  I was not. I mean, yes, I have been around ballerinas. We've had a handful of ballerinas.

• 7:06Jocko Willink?

  Very, very disciplined, very hard. And they're also very concerned about weight. So they're very concerned about weight. So that's a little bit crazy. My daughter that did ballet had more injuries than my other daughter, than my other daughter that did gymnastics and wrestling. So that kind of, that kind of tells you something. So you, but you were doing the dance, the coordinated dance thing? Is that what it was?

• 7:29Speaker 01

  Halftime events and football, you know, the pretty athletic dances, those not cheerleading, but what we would call drill team.

• 7:37Jocko Willink?

  Are you flipping?

• 7:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:39Jocko Willink?

  Are you getting thrown around?

• 7:41Speaker 01

  No.

• 7:41Jocko Willink?

  No.

• 7:42Speaker 01

  I mean, yes, you could be, but.

• 7:44Jocko Willink?

  And was that your main athletic pursuit?

• 7:46Speaker 01

  Actually, prior to that, I did track and also gymnastics.

• 7:50Jocko Willink?

  Okay. How long did you do gymnastics for?

• 7:53Speaker 01

  A couple of years.

• 7:54Jocko Willink?

  Okay. Did you train more than two hours a day of gymnastics? There's a certain point with gymnastics where the kids go from training like one hour a day to like five hours a day. And I'm talking 10 or 11 year old kids. It gets crazy pretty quick. So that can happen with anything. But you got out of it before that went crazy.

• 8:14Speaker 01

  I did. I got out of that. I was interested in soccer too. I tried all these different things and ultimately I landed on dance.

• 8:21Jocko Willink?

  And when you were doing dancing, was that when you started like looking at yourself in the mirror and thinking about how you looked?

• 8:26Speaker 01

  No, in fact, I, I didn't even think about it. And the food, relationship to food had nothing to do with how I looked.

• 8:35Jocko Willink?

  You mean in your mind, you didn't make that connection?

• 8:37Speaker 01

  No.

• 8:38Jocko Willink?

  What were you, were you eating? Were you lean? Were you just lean because you were young and you were just dancing all the time?

• 8:44Speaker 01

  Yes, naturally athletic, never thought about body weight. And I graduated high school early and I moved to Hawaii. I moved in with my godmother who it was a PhD in nutritional sciences. And I became very fascinated with nutrition.

• 8:58Jocko Willink?

  Wait, what? So what age was this?

• 9:00Speaker 01

  I graduated high school, I think I had just turned, graduated in three and a half years. So I just turned 17 maybe.

• 9:06Jocko Willink?

  Okay. So you turned 17, you moved to Hawaii. Are you still, what are you doing for activities now? Like for active lifestyle?

• 9:12Speaker 01

  Uh, yes, I was lifting, I was training, I was probably training about two hours a day.

• 9:17Jocko Willink?

  What were you training for?

• 9:19Speaker 01

  Nothing. I just loved it.

• 9:21Jocko Willink?

  You were lifting weights? You were doing squats?

• 9:24Speaker 01

  I was.

• 9:24Jocko Willink?

  You were doing deadlifts?

• 9:25Speaker 01

  I, well, I don't know if I was doing deadlifts, but I was doing squats and machines at that time. That was.

• 9:32Jocko Willink?

  And the goal for you doing this was what in your mind?

• 9:35Speaker 01

  It was fun.

• 9:37Jocko Willink?

  You just liked working out?

• 9:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:38Jocko Willink?

  But were you trying to like add more to your squat?

• 9:41Speaker 01

  No.

• 9:43Jocko Willink?

  You see what I'm saying?

• 9:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, no. I, I wasn't. I was just very, I had no set goal. I wasn't thinking, you know, I'm squatting 200 pounds. I need to squat 210. I wasn't thinking about any of that.

• 9:54Jocko Willink?

  Were you looking at the mirror thinking, oh, my arms look stronger right now? That looks cool?

• 9:59Speaker 01

  No, I don't, we don't really think like that. No.

• 10:04Jocko Willink?

  Were you looking at your abs then, or were you looking at some part of your body?

• 10:06Speaker 01

  I was nat- I was naturally athletically pretty fit.

• 10:11Speaker 01

  And to this day, it's just, there is a component to genetics where you, if you have started training early, you maintain the way that your body looks. And for me, I just loved being outside. I loved exercising. I thought it was amazing. And I started to then get into health and wellness and thinking, wow, well, you know, like, this is this path forward. And I didn't necessarily do it right. And I was so interested in more of the natural alternative treatments and the natural eating. But there wasn't a lot of guidance at that time. And there wasn't a lot of information in terms of dietary protein. Like, this is way before protein.

• 10:54Speaker 01

  This was really, if you wanted to go somewhere healthy, then you were gonna go to the health food store. And that's where you were gonna get your information. Maybe there's gonna be some flyers on the wall, or you'll pick up a book that was written, I don't know, in the seventies. There was a Diet for a New Planet. I don't know exactly when that came out. But, you know, you kind of turned backwards to look for current and future information, which is unusual. But no, I really was interested in the health and wellness and what that could do. My godmother at the time, who's a PhD in nutrition, was seeing patients who had cancer, was seeing all kinds of health and wellness challenges. And that's where it kind of clicked for me, that this was amazing.

• 11:38Speaker 01

  I was gonna do, I was gonna do this.

• 11:41Jocko Willink?

  This being?

• 11:42Speaker 01

  Nutrition, yeah.

• 11:45Jocko Willink?

  You said you had, you know, in the book there that I just read, you said you had an unhealthy relationship with food. What does that mean? Expand on that.

• 11:52Speaker 01

  So then I got to college, I decided I was gonna study nutritional sciences.

• 11:56Jocko Willink?

  Oh, so this is when you got to college?

• 11:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:58Jocko Willink?

  So how long were you living in Hawaii for?

• 12:00Speaker 01

  About a year.

• 12:01Jocko Willink?

  And what were you doing at the time for work?

• 12:02Speaker 01

  I was working for Roman Board.

• 12:04Jocko Willink?

  Roman Board, what's that? Oh, you were, you were just?

• 12:07Speaker 01

  I was living with my godmother, this PhD in nutritional sciences. I was driving her kids around.

• 12:12Jocko Willink?

  Okay. You were like a nanny, grocery shopper, mowing the lawn, whatever needs to happen.

• 12:17Speaker 01

  Not mowing the lawn, but yes. I was doing all the other things other than mowing the lawn and planting seeds.

• 12:22Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 12:24Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 12:24Jocko Willink?

  Not even sprouts?

• 12:25Speaker 01

  No, no, sprouts or whatever else you wanted to include on that list.

• 12:32Speaker 01

  And the unhealthy relationship with food really happened in college.

• 12:35Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 12:36Speaker 01

  Because I started studying nutritional sciences. And I don't know about you, but I am the kind of person that when I want to know something, I'm just all in and obsessive.

• 12:45Jocko Willink?

  What year is it when you start college?

• 12:47Speaker 01

  Oh God, that's a long time. I graduated in, so I graduated medical school in 2006. So I started, gosh, um, college might've been 1999. Does that sound right?

• 13:02Jocko Willink?

  Okay. So that makes sense. So at that time, I'm thinking about, we know what I knew in 1999, 1997, 1998, 1999. I remember this is in 1998 is when I first realized, this is when I started understanding what carbohydrates did and that they might not be the best thing. Because in the nineties, it was like, I remember talking to guys that were like, oh, we're cutting all fat out of our diet.

• 13:35Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 13:36Jocko Willink?

  And they were doing that and you just, they would replace those with carbohydrates. And I remember the teen guys that we, you know, we'd be talking about nutrition because we want to be strong, we want to be healthy. And then eventually I saw, I got a copy of the Atkins book, which have you ever, I'm sure you've read.

• 13:56Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 13:56Jocko Willink?

  So the Atkins book, which was written in the seventies. And that was the first book that, and I got that in 1998. And so that's when I was like, oh, wait a second. All these carbohydrates that we're eating are not going to be that good for you. And the fat that we're eating isn't this thing to be totally scared of, which is absolutely what was being said in the nineties. So yeah, it makes sense as you're getting to college in 1999.

• 14:28Jocko Willink?

  You're gonna study nutrition and what are you, what are you starting to learn? And you're talking about being obsessed with it?

• 14:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I, I get to college and I happen to, I don't know if you believe in synchronicities, but I happened to get into the class of, excuse me, a guy named Dr. Donald Lehman. And I think probably just as you experience in leadership, when you are in front of someone who is truly an expert and truly legendary, you know. And when I had got to, I went to the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana. When I got into his class, it was like nothing that I had learned before. This is a world-leading expert in protein metabolism. And it changed the way that he thought about things and the way that he was able to put things together, changed my perspective on nutrition.

• 15:16Speaker 01

  At the time, I was thinking about, you know, what is the food guide pyramid? And it's a high carbohydrate, it was very low-fat diet. I was starving. I was training, I was hungry, I, I couldn't keep it together. And then I got into his class and he really started to show and prioritize this idea of dietary protein and skeletal muscle. And he did some of the earlier studies, the way in which we think about protein now, came out of some discoveries from him. He was the guy, he's one of the guys that created this idea and discovered how we dose protein. I mean, that's, I know it sounds as if it's something that we all take for granted, like,

• 15:59Speaker 01

  yeah, obviously we know protein makes stronger muscles, but we didn't know that.

• 16:03Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I, I agree with you. Like I said, I remember in the 90s, having these conversations. The conversations were about fat, the conversations were about carbs, the conversations really weren't that much about protein. Not that they were gone from the, from the conversation, because we did take protein shakes. I mean, I've, I had my first freaking Joe Weider's Super Weight Gain 2000, like in the 80s. You know what I'm saying, Echo Charles? So, we were trying to get protein to, to build muscles, but it definitely was, it was the, kind of the, the, the, the background noise over fats, which were bad, and carbs, which were good, was kind of the thing.

• 16:45Jocko Willink?

  Protein was sort of this other thing that was the third part of the conversation, the, the subdued part of the conversation.

• 16:53Speaker 01

  And it still is. We haven't even changed the guidelines since like the 80s. The recommendations haven't changed. We've been hyper focused on carbohydrates and then fats and they change back and forth, you know, which one is worse. And then there's the black sheep of the macronutrient family that is now dietary protein. And what's so fascinating is the way in which the recommendations are set, which haven't changed since you guys were drinking protein shakes are based on a minimum amount to prevent deficiencies. And that is still how individuals are thinking about it. And now we have this somewhat of a political influence or an agenda influence about how cows and animal products are killing

• 17:38Speaker 01

  the planet, et cetera, et cetera. Red meat consumption, by the way, and it doesn't have to be a red meat conversation, but the consumption of red meat since 1975 is down 40%.

• 17:50Speaker 01

  And I only mention that because we hear a kind of narrative that further delineates us from being able to take actionable steps to achieve good health. 70% of Americans are either overweight or obese. 70%? Are you kidding me?

• 18:11Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 18:11Speaker 01

  I mean.

• 18:12Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you see those pictures now? They're circulating. You can go check them on the interwebs, but it'll be a picture of California Beach, 1956, and everyone looks good. And then they'll put next to it, California Beach, 2016, and everybody looks like junk. And these people didn't know about working out. They didn't, they didn't know like what we know about working out. We've learned so much about lifting in the past 10 years. It's incredible. So these people in 1956, they didn't know anything about that. They were just doing whatever they were doing, and yet they were in pretty good shape when you looked in on the beach in California. And so what was the big change? Well, if red meat's gone down 40%, that's definitely an indicator, isn't it?

• 18:57Speaker 01

  But again, it's a correlation, but I think that we've had a rise of these processed foods. And it doesn't help. And here's what, why it matters to us is that when we have these dietary guidelines, these dietary guidelines influence anyone that gets federal funding. They influence the military. They influence nursing homes. They influence schools. So if we have a certain guideline that is set in place, it affects people.

• 19:27Speaker 01

  To a degree that it's almost like, I don't want to say it's unfair, but the effect that it will have on children, military and aging individuals is it's tremendous. And so we, we really should get that right.

• 19:45Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I guess you could boil that down to just looking at school lunches, right? If the recommended guidelines are wrong and they're building the school lunch based on the recommended guidelines, which are wrong, the school lunches I had growing up were trash. I guess that's a general thing with school lunches, but at least if they said, oh, you have to have more protein in there. Cause they don't, I don't remember, you know, the protein would be a slice of ham in stacked between two big pieces of bread with a piece of cake and some potato chips and a carrot, right? That would be

• 20:19Jocko Willink?

  um, I'm going to go back to the book real quick, cause it kind of talks through this transition for you. You say, although I prioritized Whole Foods, I'd completely missed the mark on protein. Just like so many other people I've encountered over the years, I was keeping an intense exercise regimen of one hour cardio plus one hour of weight training daily. Under eating protein left my body starved for extra fuel. All the carbs I ate kept me hungry and at the mercy of constant blood sugar peaks and crashes. Once I added high quality strategically consumed protein to my diet, my suffering began to ease. Finally, I had regained control of my hunger. Proper nutrition helped my body recover from my workouts and supported new growth. So I could finally see the results of the effort I've been putting in. Muscle started forming and my whole body changed.

• 21:05Jocko Willink?

  So did my outlook and eventually my life. Instead of subtracting foods and activity from my life, I started adding my struggles with regulating my physiology had left me hungry, not just for food, but for understanding too. As I began following discussions about carbohydrates, fats and proteins, I quickly learned how charged and layered with confusion nutrition can be. Nearly every person I met seemed to have their own beliefs about food science. Some personal struggle with nutrition and overall fraught long-term relationship with eating that had outlasted any romantic relationship. They'd ever been in seeking answers in academia. I noticed that many of my classmates had come to study nutrition out of their own frustrations with food and diet. How had nutrition become such a touchy subject?

• 21:49Jocko Willink?

  Why did people eat the foods they ate? Why did some struggle with weight and food obsession for a lifetime? With so little progress, these initial questions led me to a life spent treating people. I'm here to share the lessons I've learned. So.

• 22:04Jocko Willink?

  Do you remember the transition when you started adding protein into your diet? Like, how did you go about it?

• 22:11Speaker 01

  Um, this is going to be ridiculous to hear. And also, as I'm listening to you read this, you're probably thinking, gosh, two hours a day. That's, that's a, that's a day off for me, for you guys. So I have to acknowledge that.

• 22:25Jocko Willink?

  Two hours a day, if you're, if you're doing two hours of hard cardio and two hours of hard lifting, that's, that's, that's, that's a lot. That's a lot of workout. I always tell people, if you do something really hard for 10 minutes. I mean, I've got workouts 10 minutes long. That'll make me need a day and a half to recover. So yeah, that's a lot of work. That's a lot of work for a human being. And especially people that are listening to this that normal people with nine to five jobs and kids and families.

• 22:49Speaker 01

  A lot of volume.

• 22:49Jocko Willink?

  That's a lot of volume. So.

• 22:51Speaker 01

  So I do remember when I started adding it, eh, protein back in, first of all, I was largely vegetarian. I was almost vegan. I ate very little protein and I, the first thing that I started to add in was chicken. And I actually felt really guilty. And think about it. I think that there's also a lot of young women.

• 23:10Jocko Willink?

  Guilty about like I'm putting bad food into my body, guilting about killing a chicken.

• 23:15Speaker 01

  Killing a chicken.

• 23:16Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 23:17Speaker 01

  And it's interesting because back then, um, I, I still think that there are these processes. How many girls do you have?

• 23:24Jocko Willink?

  Three girls, one boy.

• 23:25Speaker 01

  Three girls. I think that all girl, again, I can just speak to my experience and my friends' experiences and seeing a lot of younger girls in my clinic is that they all seem to go through this dietary transition and they, you know.

• 23:44Speaker 01

  At some point potentially feel very bad about eating animals. And I don't know if your girls experienced that, but I definitely remember when I was making the decision. My teeth felt loose.

• 23:56Jocko Willink?

  How long did you keep up with it for?

• 23:58Speaker 01

  Uh, at least two years. At least two years, I was, I was largely vegetarian, if very close to vegan for two years. My hair started falling out.

• 24:09Jocko Willink?

  Milk?

• 24:10Speaker 01

  No.

• 24:10Jocko Willink?

  Eggs?

• 24:11Speaker 01

  No. I maybe had a little bit of, like, maybe had a little bit of fish. And I was training my, I felt like my teeth were loose. I felt my hair was falling out. I, I just felt terrible. And um, I felt very guilty when I added in that chicken, but I couldn't believe how much better I felt.

• 24:33Jocko Willink?

  I read a, I read a book one time. It's called The Vegetarian Myth. It's by a woman named Lea R. Keith. And I don't know how I remember. I always get books. This is a long time ago too. But she was in terrible health. She was a vegan and she was just falling apart. Kind of like what you're saying, hair falling out, depressed, sad. Just her body composition was terrible. And she went to a bunch of doctors and they'd say, well, what are you eating? And she's like, it can't be my diet. I'm a vegan. Like I eat perfectly clean. And finally one doctor said, that's your problem. And she was in a state of disbelief, but then she got to a point where she didn't have any choice because she was gonna die.

• 25:13Jocko Willink?

  And I forget what, I think the first thing that she ate was like a tuna or fish or something. And she described it as she like put it to her mouth. She felt like this gratification and like her soul was being replenished. And it was kind of like what you're saying, the same similar thing where she's falling apart, hair falling out, like just feels terrible. And then turn around, she, she knew, she, she like, she writes that when she ate that, she knew that that's what she'd been missing.

• 25:47Speaker 01

  You know, it's so fascinating. Um, you know, I've studied nutrition now for 20 years and. It's the one thing that we all do. We all have to eat. Yet, the variations that we have, it's one of the only things that I can think of, that we have an incredibly varied approach to. There's no way that you eat the same as Echo, as myself. You take every single person in your gym, I guarantee you, there's not one person throughout the day that is eating the exact same amount of iron, or zinc, etc. Yet, it's the most important thing that we do, and we have no standard way of doing it.

• 26:30Jocko Willink?

  And, everybody's a little bit different, right?

• 26:33Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 26:33Jocko Willink?

  So, you might need more protein, I might need less protein, you might need more fat, I mean, and, depending on what I'm doing, there might be a, if I'm going hunting in the mountains, I might need more fat. If I'm going to compete in jujitsu, I might need less fat. So, there's all these other elements that come into play as a human.

• 26:52Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 26:53Jocko Willink?

  That you gotta kinda know your, to read your own gauges a little bit.

• 26:56Speaker 01

  Yes, and what's so, I mean, and there's ways to test for it now. I mean, it's not solely about body composition. We've certainly gotten more advanced in where we can test for vitamins and mineral deficiencies, etc. But it is fascinating that the nutrition space is so confusing. It seems as if nobody agrees on any kind of foundational principles. And if the ultimate outcome is being able to get after it your entire life, we have to put things in place so that people at least have a chance. I was trying to do everything right. I was literally studying nutritional sciences.

• 27:35Speaker 01

  And even at the academic level, which I continued on, ended up doing a fellowship in this, people still were disagreeing.

• 27:46Speaker 01

  On the one thing that we all do, aside from breathe.

• 27:50Jocko Willink?

  And people will continue to disagree. Um, well, there was a while and look, my wife and I were, we get along great. And there was a little while where she told me, she never says stuff like this to me. She told me, hey, you're not allowed to talk about nutrition with my friends. And as a couple of her friends were nutrition science, you know, they'd gone to school for nutrition science. And so they had probably gone in the eighties, right? You know, this is my age group. They probably gone in the eighties, early nineties. That's when they graduated. So when I'm in there telling them, you don't need any carbohydrates at all. And they're like, are you kidding me?

• 28:33Jocko Willink?

  And my wife finally just said, hey, don't talk about nutrition with my friends anymore. And I was like, okay, cool, whatever. Um, but the interesting thing is they all kind of came around. They all eventually as, as the, I guess, as science caught up to the world. And especially as it caught up to academia, it seems like they made progress.

• 28:55Speaker 01

  It's very slow.

• 28:56Jocko Willink?

  How long was it when you got in this class with Dr. Lehman? So you get in this class with Dr. Lehman, he starts talking about protein. How long did it take for you to go, I need to up my protein. I need to start eating meat. How long did that take?

• 29:11Speaker 01

  Pretty quickly.

• 29:11Jocko Willink?

  Pretty quickly.

• 29:12Speaker 01

  I, I can, you know, he's still my mentor today. That book is dedicated to him. It's pretty unusual to have a mentor relationship, 20 years of 20 some years, pretty quickly.

• 29:24Jocko Willink?

  So you go through that and now you're starting to feel good.

• 29:32Jocko Willink?

  Then you decide, hey, I'm just going to go all the way. Nutrition, I'm good, I'm good with nutrition. Now I'm going to go, going to continue on this path.

• 29:38Speaker 01

  No, there was a, um, I was sitting in a class of, uh, a nutritional science class with, there's two tracks. It was dietetics and medicine. That's pretty much how, how you do it. And there was a tornado warning and we all had to go to this tornado, you know, the, the cornfields of Illinois lend itself to tornadoes. And I was sitting in the fallout shelter. I swear it felt like for hours. And I was sitting there with a bunch of people from the nutrition class and I just felt useless. I felt like a useless piece of shit.

• 30:17Jocko Willink?

  Why?

• 30:17Speaker 01

  Because in a moment of emergency, I had no skill set to do anything valuable.

• 30:24Jocko Willink?

  Got it.

• 30:25Speaker 01

  And to be of use is a value of mine and has been a, a, just a driving force to actually really be of service to people. And I couldn't do anything. And it was at that moment I decided to go to medical school.

• 30:39Jocko Willink?

  Okay. Okay. So you apply to medical schools and you end up going to Arizona College of Osteopathic Medicine. That's where you end up going to. Um, and how's this? How, how is that school? What do you, what do you learn? Are you focused on nutrition? Like what do you, what do you focus on there?

• 30:57Speaker 01

  So I, I go, get to medical school. Um, I, I thought that, and I chose osteopathic school. So, uh, there's two types of physicians that carry the same license. I'm not sure if you guys are aware there's.

• 31:09Jocko Willink?

  I had to study it yesterday. I had to figure it out. Two days ago, when I was prepping for this podcast, I had to figure out the difference between osteopathic medicine.

• 31:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:16Jocko Willink?

  And what is it?

• 31:18Speaker 01

  Medical doctor.

• 31:19Jocko Willink?

  And it's also important for people that are overseas that are listening, osteopathic medicine in America is a lot different than osteopathic.

• 31:25Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 31:26Jocko Willink?

  Medicine in, uh, in every other country as a matter of fact.

• 31:29Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 31:29Jocko Willink?

  So in America, if you are an MD medical doctor or an osteopathic, uh, doctor, either one of those, you can prescribe medicine. You can do surgery.

• 31:42Jocko Willink?

  It's just that you have this additional sort of coverage, which is on sort of the whole body functioning together as a big unit. That's what it is. Now overseas, an osteo, I don't know if they call it osteopathic doctor, but an osteopathic medicine practitioner in most countries overseas can't do surgery, from what I understand. They can't prescribe medicine. They're like an advisor. They can definitely help you with nutrition. They might even, correct me if I'm wrong, they do like massage and things like that?

• 32:13Speaker 01

  I, I have no idea.

• 32:14Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 32:15Speaker 01

  Not sure.

• 32:16Jocko Willink?

  But. But you chose this path because you wanted this sort of holistic view of

• 32:21Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 32:21Jocko Willink?

  Medicine?

• 32:22Speaker 01

  Yes, and I was very interested in skeletal muscle.

• 32:26Speaker 01

  You're absolutely correct. In the US and MDDO, they're the same. The training is the same. In fact, I did an MD fellowship. There's no restrictions on licensing. The the chat, the opportunity that a DO has is we get additional training for musculoskeletal manual therapy. If in fact, we want to use it and we also

• 32:44Jocko Willink?

  In manual therapy, that means massage?

• 32:46Speaker 01

  No, no.

• 32:47Jocko Willink?

  No, I'm sorry, I don't know.

• 32:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, no, it's not massage. It's actually, for example, if your shoulder hurt, I would look to see, is it coming from your neck? Is it coming from somewhere else? It's it's training and the way that the body functions as a unit.

• 33:00Jocko Willink?

  Got it.

• 33:02Speaker 01

  So that's kind of the and many osteopathic physicians don't practice that. It's just additional learning that they don't practice.

• 33:11Jocko Willink?

  Which is weird because doctors also, if you have a problem with your shoulder, they look at your neck. Right? I mean, normal doctors do that too.

• 33:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, so basically, it's it is additional training and I would say there's some philosophical view that the body is an entire unit. And that it functions as more of a holistic perspective. At least when I was training, I think that it's there's less delineation now.

• 33:39Speaker 01

  It seems like there's much less delineation now.

• 33:41Jocko Willink?

  That's the articles that I read about it says that this has become closer and closer together, less and less differences between the two in the past decade or so.

• 33:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, I would agree with that.

• 33:50Jocko Willink?

  So you're going to school, you're going to college, you didn't like it?

• 33:53Speaker 01

  Ah, I was like, should I quit this? This is terrible.

• 33:55Jocko Willink?

  How long is it? Is it four years?

• 33:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:58Jocko Willink?

  You didn't like it?

• 33:58Speaker 01

  No.

• 33:59Jocko Willink?

  Because you don't like studying?

• 34:00Speaker 01

  I love studying. It was all pathology. It was all what is wrong with the body? What goes wrong? You know, and and we spend all of this time looking outward, trying to fix these problems. As opposed to what is the foundational perspective that we have? You know, we are more overweight, we're sicker, we have all these problems and we're still, we're looking for quote solutions. But from my perspective, what if the solution is getting your lifestyle right? Instead of continuing to spend four trillion dollars a year on X, Y, and Z to further the health of Americans, I think that we have a lot of the answers. So I hated medical school.

• 34:46Speaker 01

  Thought that it was just, I don't know anyone who really likes it. My husband, he kinda liked it. It was, it was cool for him. But, uh, yeah, I thought many times I was gonna quit. And by the time I finished medical school, I had thought to myself, maybe I won't even go to residency. Maybe I won't even go to additional training. So the last minute, I applied to three places, which is unheard of. So my husband, who was a SEAL, was a medic in the teams. He applied, I think he might have applied to thirty programs or something like that. Thirty programs.

• 35:24Jocko Willink?

  And he go to, what did he go to Rutgers?

• 35:26Speaker 01

  So he went to medical school at Rutgers and then he graduated top of his class, actually.

• 35:31Jocko Willink?

  Oh, of course.

• 35:32Speaker 01

  Not bad for a-

• 35:33Jocko Willink?

  He's a team guy. He's getting after it. He's not gonna let anybody beat him in anything.

• 35:36Speaker 01

  It was, you know, it's so funny. Cause we're all like, ah, I don't know if this medical school is gonna just crush it. Publish like twelve papers, graduate with honors, the whole thing. So when he finished, he applied to thirty programs. When I finished, I applied, I think to three places. I'm like, I'm not doing this. And I don't care if anyone accepts me because this was a terrible choice.

• 35:59Speaker 01

  I applied to Mayo Clinic, which I actually got accepted. I, and that was for family medicine. And then I applied to University of Louisville for psychiatry. And I think I applied one more place. I did the interviews and I actually got accepted to all of them. Okay, fine. And then decided to do psychiatry for two years. And I thought that if I had to do something, I'm going to learn what it takes to function and be mentally tough. I was, I really thought that psychiatry was all about how do we progress the way that we think.

• 36:34Jocko Willink?

  So what are you doing during your residency as a psychiatry? So psychiatry can use, again, I'm ignorant. Psychologists will talk to you, psychiatrist will prescribe you drugs.

• 36:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:46Jocko Willink?

  Is that right?

• 36:46Speaker 01

  It's a combination of both. I actually found my training in psychiatry really valuable.

• 36:52Speaker 01

  And also very intense. It wasn't what I had anticipated nor what I had expected. At the University of Louisville, they have an emergency psychiatric unit. And it is, has armed guards. It is a small box. They put everybody together, whether you have schizophrenia, bipolar, you name it, but they have all of these people in the same room. I can't say that it's very safe, right? They have bulletproof glass behind the intake area. And it became so clear to me that the brain is an organ system, that it is fully its own organ system, just like the lungs can get pneumonia, the brain can get sick.

• 37:36Speaker 01

  It was very fascinating. But there was a moment in time where I felt like, you know, this really isn't for me. And I was working in the psychiatric ER, because you have to do that as part of your rotation. And they brought a body in.

• 37:55Speaker 01

  And it was of a 21-year-old kid who had jumped off of this six-story parking garage. He broke every bone and, you know, he died. And his dad was an orthopedic surgeon at the hospital.

• 38:16Speaker 01

  And I had to tell him. And it was at that moment that I just thought, you know, this, this is not what I had thought it was. And this isn't where I was really going with this nutrition and etc. and all the things. And so that really, that really struck me.

• 38:41Jocko Willink?

  How long, so this is a two-year residency?

• 38:43Speaker 01

  No, it was four. So I left after two years.

• 38:46Jocko Willink?

  Okay. So your two years of you're dealing with people that have psychiatric outbursts, they're suicidal, they're violent. What's your day-to-day? Talk me through like a average day.

• 39:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, you know, it varies depending on what rotation you were on. But the, a typical rotation would be you would check in, you would go into the lockdown unit, so they have a lockdown unit at the hospital. And you obviously have your patients, there's a code to get in. It is a very sterile environment, and people are typically highly medicated. And it's not necessarily, and I'm not trying to paint a picture of mental illness for the world. This was just my experience, and this was what the rotation and what my day to day was like. It wasn't always safe. There were multiple times in this tight lockdown unit where the physicians were attacked,

• 39:46Speaker 01

  where the, it wasn't, you know, it wasn't abnormal for a person to require restraints. I mean, this was real mental illness. And you round on these patients, you have care teams, there was no nutritional intervention. They were eating the same crap that, you know, it comes from Pop-Tarts, etc. Nothing was done. These guys weren't exercising. It was, it felt almost, and I haven't been to prison, but it felt almost as if these guys were imprisoned for their own safety. And so that's what a day to day would be. And then if you were on call.

• 40:21Jocko Willink?

  So you're going to see a patient. Tell me about a patient, like what's going on with the patient?

• 40:26Speaker 01

  I had one patient that, I'll tell you a story, another one that really struck me. I had one patient who had schizophrenia, and he had been actually in prison because he, he'd burned his house down with his family in it.

• 40:42Jocko Willink?

  And, and so, are, when you go to interact with him?

• 40:47Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 40:48Jocko Willink?

  What, what is your goal in interacting with him?

• 40:50Speaker 01

  It is...

• 40:54Speaker 01

  You know, to get a sense of how stable he was on his medications.

• 40:57Jocko Willink?

  Because it's not like they're gonna release him to the world.

• 40:59Speaker 01

  No, no, he goes, he had been in, um, I don't know if it was prison, but he had been in, you know, a different type of lockdown unit. Again, there's flux, whether they have to come to the hospital for whatever their challenges are, because people also get sick, whether they have an infection, etc. Um, so the typical, that was an example of a patient, you know, when you're reading the history and you have to determine what their blood levels are, are they stable on a certain medication?

• 41:25Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 41:26Speaker 01

  And what is it, come, what do I mean by stable? Are they hearing voices? Are they, uh, taking their medications? Are they cheeking their medications? What is the sense of, are they alert and oriented to?

• 41:40Jocko Willink?

  Were you in a position with these people? Was there anybody that you could help? Meaning, was there people that you could progress over, you were there for two years. Did you see anyone progress to the point where you're like, okay, this person can go back out of the world and?

• 41:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:56Jocko Willink?

  Or were you in a, such a severe ward that these people aren't ever gonna get anywhere?

• 42:02Speaker 01

  Um, well, again, we go through rotations and, um, you know, part of it is a handful of months on this lockdown unit and then it's in the emergency psychiatric ward. So you don't, the only continuity of care you have is in your own clinic. So you are required also to see patients on a one-on-one basis and those individuals typically are much more stable. And in terms of progression, yes, there was one, I had one woman who, she was already living in, you know, the regular world, regular world, I don't know if there's a better way, a non-lockdown unit.

• 42:36Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 42:37Speaker 01

  But that, yes, so there was some progression, but you know, at the same point, I would see frequent flyers. And at one point, I had gotten followed and, um, again, the brain has its own illnesses where this person had created delusions about me and, uh, had been followed and all of these things. So I had to have security escort me every time I would go to the hospital and escort me back out of the hospital for a period of time.

• 43:09Jocko Willink?

  Who comes into an emergency psychiatric ward on a Friday night, on a Saturday night? Like, what are you dealing with in that, those scenarios?

• 43:18Speaker 01

  I can, I can share with you how I dealt with it, which was, which was different than the way that the other residents dealt with it. The individuals that will come in, the typical was if someone had a bipolar episode, maybe they were manic, maybe they were depressive, maybe they were a danger to themselves. Those individuals were brought in on a mental inquest warrant, so they were brought in by the police or someone like that and dropped off in this lockdown unit, processed through in this lockdown unit. Maybe there's a fifteen to twenty spots. So that would be an individual, an individual that was going through-

• 43:56Jocko Willink?

  And they were out in the city and they were threatening someone, or-

• 43:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:59Jocko Willink?

  Having a standoff with the police, and I'm gonna kill you, I'm gonna kill myself, and they're showing up at your ward?

• 44:03Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 44:04Jocko Willink?

  Okay, and that's what's, so that's what you're seeing Friday night, Saturday night?

• 44:08Speaker 01

  But that's not all. And then we had individuals that were schizophrenic, that were hallucinating, that, you know, were seeing angels, or seeing the devil, and potentially very aggressive, and some that weren't. You also had individuals that were hungry, that were homeless and hungry, or individuals that were going through withdrawals, whether it was alcohol or drug withdrawal. So what I would do is I would go through the glass, the bulletproof glass, and I would take my clipboard, and I would go to everyone and say, "Why are you here? Are you hungry? Do you need medication? Or, you know, are you hearing voices?" And maybe, I didn't say that, but something like that.

• 44:52Speaker 01

  And it was highly effective, because I, there wasn't a judgment towards them, it was, "Why are they here and what is the, the real issue that needs to be addressed?" And maybe they were just hungry, maybe they didn't have the resources that they needed. And by doing that, I was able to process them through quickly, as opposed to the standard way of doing things would be, take one person at a time. And, um-

• 45:16Jocko Willink?

  Oh, so you'd kind of triage them?

• 45:18Speaker 01

  I did.

• 45:18Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 45:19Speaker 01

  I did.

• 45:21Jocko Willink?

  It's, this is interesting to me because I didn't understand too much about this for my life and I started to realize that, well, it's what you said, like the brain is an organ and you can have problems with it, just like you have problems, the way I always describe is you can have problems with your car. Like when I'm talking to someone and they're going through some kind of like psychological issue and they're having a hard time with it, I explain to them, because a lot of them are military guys and they don't want to hear like, well, you need help. They want to hear, so the way I break it down to them is, look, man, this is like, you're, you have a problem with your car? You don't just not, if you keep driving, it's gonna break, it's gonna, it's gonna blow up. You need to get it fixed, you need to take it to a mechanic, take it to a brain mechanic,

• 46:04Jocko Willink?

  that's what a psychologist, that's what a psychiatrist is. But, and what I'm kind of putting together now is like, you're dealing with the people that were on the extreme end of this, but there's so many, well, correct me if I'm wrong, but what it seems like to me is there's a whole bunch of degrees of mental illness, right? You can be bipolar, schizophrenic, like, I'm hearing voices, but there's also just like a normal person that's like going through issues that they can get help to, they need to, they, they, they might not be so obvious, but they might feel depressed, they might feel anxious or whatever these things are, and they can still get help, it's actually easier to help that person because it's not as severe of a problem. Is that a good assessment?

• 46:46Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 46:47Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 46:47Speaker 01

  Yes. And you know, I, I, at some point, pretty quickly realized this, this wasn't the training, it was so valuable, because ultimately, I interface with people, I treat people. And if you cannot get their brain on track, there's nothing you can do. I could provide the most amazing program, but if they don't have discipline and worthiness and are able to understand the narratives that go on in their head, there's nothing I can do. It was incredibly valuable, but psychiatry was definitely not for me.

• 47:20Jocko Willink?

  So. For two years you do this.

• 47:23Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 47:24Jocko Willink?

  And then you decide I'm out. I don't want, this is not what I want to do all the time for the rest of my life.

• 47:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 47:31Jocko Willink?

  What's the process look? Do you, what do you present? Go to the director of the program?

• 47:35Speaker 01

  Not going. I, I found it very unsupportive, the place. It just, you know, um, my experience was that, um, yeah, I just left. And I said, hey, yeah, this isn't, this isn't the thing for me.

• 47:50Jocko Willink?

  We used to go to a, your husband might've been there too. We used to go to an old psychiatric facility to train. Did he ever tell you about that? We, we would do training. It's an old, you know, in order for us to do urban combat and close quarters combat, you want to go to places where you haven't been before. And there was an old psychiatric facility and we would go there and there's a bunch of buildings and it was the creepiest place to go in at night and walk around it. And there was still relics of what had gone on there. And there's a whole, there's a whole world to explore when it comes to institutions and mental institutions. There was a, a ton of abuse that was going on in those things.

• 48:31Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 48:31Jocko Willink?

  And that's if you've ever read the book, One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, or seen the movie, One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest. Fantastic. But that, that movie sort of was the, the climax of, hey, we're abusing these people and giving them lobotomies and they don't belong in there. And unfortunately, we've gone to this extreme where there's no real mental health facilities anymore. There's not enough mental health. The, I forget the numbers. There used to be thousands of beds for every hundred thousand, you know, civilians or citizens. And now it's like a hundred or eighty-two beds or something. It's, it's not adequate at all. That's why we have such a problem with homelessness. That's why we have such a problem with, with drug abuse. It's like those people used to get taken and put into a facility.

• 49:16Jocko Willink?

  Unfortunately, the facilities oftentimes were corrupt. So we threw the baby out with the bathwater. So you're doing this and you say, you know what, I'm, I'm not doing this.

• 49:24Speaker 01

  That's exactly what happened.

• 49:26Jocko Willink?

  And then it was, then it was off to Washington University. Did you go right into that next program? How'd that work?

• 49:32Speaker 01

  So I, I took a breather and then I went to a program in New York, which was North Shore LIJ. And I did that for-

• 49:41Jocko Willink?

  North Shore what?

• 49:42Speaker 01

  North Shore LIJ. And that was my next program and that was family medicine and I completed that. That was a really great experience. That took three years.

• 49:52Jocko Willink?

  So that was your residency?

• 49:54Speaker 01

  That was my residency.

• 49:55Jocko Willink?

  You get done with that residency and that was normal. You're helping people, family medicine, you're seeing kids.

• 50:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:01Jocko Willink?

  You're helping them get better. You know, that's the one thing, whenever I think about doctors and what they're doing, you're seeing sick people all day. I have, I, I know you're friends with Johnny Kim. When Johnny Kim was, was trying to become a doctor and I remember telling him in front of this officer board, I was like, I hate doctors, I hate nurses, I hate hospitals. I don't like to go there. I don't like medicine. I don't like any of it. If, if I ever have to go, I would love for you to be taken care of. That's what I said to Johnny Kim. So one of the cool things or one of the negative things I always think of like, you're seeing sick people all the time.

• 50:35Speaker 01

  I was terrible.

• 50:37Jocko Willink?

  And, and seeing sick kids.

• 50:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:39Jocko Willink?

  But I guess in family medicine, you start to get kids that you can help and you can move them forward and you can help them get better. So that's awesome. And when I said, I hate doctors and nurses, for you doctors and nurses, I'm, it's a matter of speaking, right? I really appreciate what you do every day. I wouldn't want to do it and I don't like when I have to. Whenever I go to the doctor, which is seldom, I always tell them, I hope I never have to see you again. And they say, well, I, I hope the same thing. So there you go.

• 51:01Speaker 01

  That's very funny. And I would say again, you know, you and I were talking and, and Echo were talking, I take care of a lot of former team guys and their families. They feel the same way. The wives love me, but the guys are like, oh, okay. Well, I gotta do this and, and I'm fine with it.

• 51:16Speaker 01

  What I loved about family medicine is that, now you've got to remember, I had studied nutrition. And I had studied nutritional sciences and hadn't stopped because I feel and have felt very passionate about it. And when I went to do family medicine, I, yes, I saw sick people, you know, you do hospital rounds and you do pronounce a lot of people dead, you know, you're in the trenches. But you also have clinic where you're seeing kids that you can help. And you're seeing patients that don't have things critically wrong with them, for the most part. I mean, again, it just depends on which part of the rotation that you're on.

• 51:59Speaker 01

  But I was able to start doing nutritional sciences with them, putting them on programs as a resident, watching them get better, maybe even sneaking in a vitamin D lab. And it was amazing. And I felt useful because they were able to transform their health and they were able to lose weight and they were able to feel worthy and executed the things that they they needed to do. And then when I graduated, and by the way, I have to say though, there was a lot I didn't really like about the standard medical care because I saw all the flaws in it. There's a lot of medication being given out. A lot of the people that we were seeing had things that were preventable. People were going into the hospital and the first thing that we were doing is putting

• 52:44Speaker 01

  them on bedrest. There's no faster way to destroy the health of skeletal muscle than to put someone on bedrest and then give them Jell-O and Cheerios. And they didn't even have a chance. From a nutritional perspective, you're not even going to have a chance because it was so backwards. Again, the dietary guidelines affect things and places that get federal funding. I'm not saying that this hospital, I think this is a private hospital, but it's a standard of care that we're providing.

• 53:16Speaker 01

  When I was graduating, I'm like, oh, gosh, more school? Because now, at this point, I'd already done undergraduate in nutritional sciences and vitamin mineral metabolism, and then two years detour in psychiatry, and then three years in family medicine. And I was like, gosh, you know, I have to be able to learn more. So then, I did a fellowship at Washington University in geriatrics and nutritional sciences.

• 53:47Jocko Willink?

  What made you choose geriatrics?

• 53:48Speaker 01

  I did not want to do geriatrics. The deal was, in order for me to learn from the best, so are you familiar with Wash U?

• 53:56Jocko Willink?

  No.

• 53:57Speaker 01

  Wash U is one of the best schools in the country. Their acceptance rate is like, a few percent. But in order for me to go there, I had to get funding. And the way I was going to get funding was to be a geriatrician. And for those listening, geriatrics is over the age of 65. It is typically people that if they, you know, this was dementia, this was Alzheimer's, this is people in nursing homes. It wasn't what I had envisioned for myself. But I was willing to do it because I wanted to study with the best. And I did a two-year fellowship in geriatrics and nutritional sciences.

• 54:42Speaker 01

  And they seem as if it's so different, like this geriatrics and actually obesity medicine was some of the research that I did. And it seems as if they are on two various ends of the spectrum, but they're not. And by the way, there's so many knives on the table, I'm afraid I'm going to like, knock one off. And then we're going to have to really call a doctor.

• 55:01Jocko Willink?

  Just don't cut yourself, that would suck.

• 55:04Speaker 01

  And I was working on this study, and I was looking at body composition and brain function. And you know, we all have that one person that affects us. The one person that changes the trajectory of everything that we thought. And I was looking at body composition, body fat, and brain function. And I imaged the brain of this woman. She was a mom of three kids, in her mid-50s, always struggled with the same 20 or 30 pounds, everything that the food guide pyramid had told her, the white, blah, blah, blah, Weight Watchers. And I imaged her brain, and her brain looked like the beginning of an Alzheimer's brain. And I was like, what are we doing?

• 55:46Speaker 01

  We're hyper focused on obesity. We don't have an obesity epidemic. The one thing that all my patients had in common, my sickest patients was they didn't have any muscle and they didn't have any healthy muscle.

• 55:59Speaker 01

  And I was like, God, we've been, we've been chasing this obesity epidemic for the last 50 years. And we're fatter than ever. And are we asking the wrong question?

• 56:12Speaker 01

  And in fact, I believe that we are.

• 56:16Speaker 01

  And that's where the book premise of this idea of muscle centric medicine came from.

• 56:22Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I got the, the, in the book, just like to, to just give that section of the book. Cause it's, it's pretty interesting how it all ends up. He said, once today I worked on examined the connections between body weight and brain function and found a correlation between a wider waistline and lower brain volume. The working premise was that obesity causes insulin resistance in the brain, a sort of type three diabetes of cerebral matter. That's a really interesting thing that I hadn't heard of before. Calling Alzheimer's and brain function type three diabetes. As he echoes nodding his head because he's making that connection over there. That could lead to dementia. Our research showed that people with obesity often had impaired overall cognitive responses such

• 57:04Jocko Willink?

  as impulse control, task switching, and other mental challenges. Again, you're just, you're saying obesity, people with obesity had these problems, impulse control, task switching, other mental challenges. I became very invested in the study's participants, especially Betsy. That's who you were just talking about. A mother of three in her early 50s who had always put her family and others first. Betsy had spent decades struggling to lose the same 15 or 20 pounds she'd been carrying since her first pregnancy, but she couldn't, but she shouldn't have been advised to focus on the weight she had to lose. The real threat lay with what she had failed to build.

• 57:41Jocko Willink?

  Imaging her brain revealed her future. The pictures I saw looked like those of someone with Alzheimer's. I knew what was in store for her within the next few decades and it crushed me. I felt that I, along with the mainstream medical community and society, had failed her. To me, she represented dozens of patients I had seen in the same position. Then it hit me. These people had one thing in common. Low muscle mass or some impairment to their muscle. They all lacked the strength to perform certain basic movements. And they had low physical tone along with blood markers that indicated unhealthy muscle. Their issue wasn't body fat, I realized. It was lack of sufficient healthy muscle tissue.

• 58:24Jocko Willink?

  We in medicine and society have long been telling people to lose weight. But by focusing on fat, Betsy, like so many, had failed to get healthy no matter how hard she tried. I realized that we had gotten the narrative all wrong. And the consequences for countless individual lives would be devastating. Desperate to repair what I felt was the medical community's biggest failure, muscle-centric medicine became my mission. Is there something that led you to see that thread that other people hadn't seen?

• 59:03Speaker 01

  Well, I'd always been really interested in my own training. And I just, you know, when you start seeing death everywhere, you know, which again is a geriatrician, it's a component of that is end of life. And you're watching who are the people that get admitted to the hospital? Who are the people that are breaking a hip? Who are the people that are never walking again? And then who are the people that are thriving? And yes, it was that muscle was this key organ system that everybody had brushed over at the time. And still to this day, when we think about muscle, we think about, you know,

• 59:48Speaker 01

  like, what does a team guy care about? You know, good hair and a lot of tea and big muscles. And I think a lot of individuals are really, uh, believe that skeletal muscle is all about being jacked or being a good athlete. Yes, and.

• 1:00:07Speaker 01

  That hard, physical training does something even more tremendous. The more muscle mass you have, the greater your survivability. The more muscle mass you have, the more healthy muscle mass you have, the greater your metabolic profile, the better your metabolic profile, better potentially your brain function is, the better your survivability against anything. Yes, strength, mobility, the better your immune system. Skeletal muscle, when you contract it, is this endocrine organ that secretes these myokines, which are just big fancy words for molecules that travel throughout the body that interface. Again, back to this idea of an osteopathic physician, the body is this holistic unit. And this holistic unit was designed for hard, physical labor.

• 1:00:52Speaker 01

  And so what happened was, the way that I saw it, is we had taken out this piece of hard, physical labor. And even the, quote, "exercisers," they weren't doing enough. It just, the way in which we have become domesticated, has really destroyed us. And that is what I just became obsessively thinking about. And that how do we maintain the health of skeletal muscle as we age? And how can we change the trajectory of what we believe as health and wellness? So, in our minds, and humans are interesting, when they see something, like a pattern repeated, whether they hear it or they see it, they believe that to be the appropriate outcome.

• 1:01:37Speaker 01

  For example, if you hear enough times that red meat is killing the planet, whether it's true or not, you'll believe it. If you believe that as we age, that there will be a sharp decline in your functioning, and that this is the way in which you have to age, you believe it, and perhaps you stop training as hard, and you say, "Oh, well, this is just because I'm getting older," etc., etc. Just because it's been in repetition, and no one in the mainstream has really lived in a certain way that has exemplified what it means to age in a way of strength. We don't have, you know, the people kind of in the public eye, I wouldn't say that

• 1:02:22Speaker 01

  they are clearly defined as ways in which we would want to age. And once we get clarity about how we are planning on aging, and what the requirements are, and what it's going to take... We can simplify everything and protect ourselves and protect our loved ones. And so that's, those were some of the things that I had begun to think about. And then I started to think about when you go to the doctor, I know you don't go, maybe Echo goes. But when one, no team guy goes to the doctor ever. But when someone goes to the doctor, they'll say, what's your blood pressure? Let me listen to your heart, let me listen to your lungs. No one says, okay, how strong are you?

• 1:03:06Speaker 01

  Really, truly, how strong are you? And how much muscle mass do you actually have? That's not even a vital sign, but it should be.

• 1:03:16Jocko Willink?

  What's interesting about this, if you're listening to this right now,

• 1:03:20Jocko Willink?

  is a very similar correlation to leadership. So leadership is a skill that you can build and you can grow. Some people, they hear me talk about leadership, well, I'm not a good leader, I won't be a good leader. No, you can actually become a better leader when you learn to be more articulate, when you understand the principles of leadership, when you interact with people, when you pay attention, when you learn to, there's things that you can do to make you a better leader. Now there are people that have more natural leadership capability than other people. Those people are out there, they're really charismatic, they're really articulate. Those people exist. And that's great, they get to just step up and lead and they do a good job. But everybody else has to work for it. And you know what? It's the same thing with muscle.

• 1:04:01Jocko Willink?

  Most people, like sure, there's some people that are just genetically gifted with a whole bunch of muscle mass. Good for them, that's awesome. Most people, they, you have to work, you have to do work. And if you don't do work, you won't get strong, you won't get stronger, you definitely won't maintain strength. So I mean, I work out all, every day. Echo works out every day and probably takes every third day off.

• 1:04:26Speaker 01

  Fourth day.

• 1:04:26Jocko Willink?

  Fourth day. So, but this is a pattern that you've been doing for, you're now 40, how old are you?

• 1:04:34Speaker 02

  Forty six.

• 1:04:34Jocko Willink?

  Forty six years old?

• 1:04:36Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:04:36Jocko Willink?

  You started lifting when you were ten?

• 1:04:39Speaker 02

  Fifteen, sixteen.

• 1:04:39Jocko Willink?

  Fifteen, but you were doing pushups at ten?

• 1:04:41Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:04:42Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, pushups just to get a little bit bigger than he's got it to him, brother. You wanted a little bit more, Jack?

• 1:04:46Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:04:46Jocko Willink?

  But that's a long time. That's thirty years of lifting, roughly speaking.

• 1:04:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:04:50Jocko Willink?

  Me, I'm the same way. You know, I started working out probably when I was fifteen or sixteen. You know, just with the sports, but you're doing a little bit like, oh, I think I can get biceps or whatever, because that's what you're thinking in nineteen eighty-three. You're like, oh.

• 1:05:03Speaker 02

  Oh, hell, yeah.

• 1:05:04Jocko Willink?

  You see, you see Rocky or whatever doing chin ups. You're gonna do some of that. But then, you know, spending my adult life in the teams where you're working out all the time. And then not stopping working out. We were talking about this before we hit record today. Like, I trained jiu-jitsu. I still train jiu-jitsu. I still get on the mat with the, with the young beasts and train with them hard. And I believe that the reason I'm able to do that is because I never stopped lifting. And I never stopped lifting. I don't take a three, a month off or three months off or three weeks off because I was busy or this or that, because I think that's a huge opportunity for you to get injured. You take, you take three weeks off or a month off?

• 1:05:47Jocko Willink?

  And then you're like, I'm gonna go back in there and you try and lift something that you haven't lifted in a while. That's when you get hurt. And actually, the figures that you put in the book, and you're gonna have to remind me, or maybe you don't remember them off the top of your head, but the amount of what your percentage of muscle loss goes down when you're not lifting? It's extraordinary, isn't it? It's horrible. It's horrible. And I didn't know that. Now that I know that, I'm even gonna work out even more. I'm gonna go for every day, like, I'm gonna go nine times a day. That's what we're doing.

• 1:06:13Jocko Willink?

  Uh, but so, so people that are listening right now, and actually, I forgot to tell you this before we hit record. Um, this book of yours, my mom is eighty-something, and it was part of her book club. That's cool. And so she, she read it, but for people that might be seventy-five, forty-eight, fifty-two, twenty-eight, it doesn't matter where you are. You you've got to put in the effort to maintain your muscle in your body. You gotta do it. It's going to help you with every aspect of your life. And I've always known that. Actually, we've said that on this podcast. I put a disclaimer, it was a free field manual. I've been saying that for, I just didn't, I just didn't really explain it very well. And I certainly didn't

• 1:06:56Jocko Willink?

  have the, we had bro science to back it up. We backed it up with bro science hard, right? Living proof right here of bro science. Oh, I'm still rolling. But the science that you have and the experience that you have in that, in that area makes it very obvious that if you're out there, you're listening to this right now, you should be lifting weights and trying to be strong. That's what you should be doing. That should be a priority in your life. It might even be the number one priority in your life.

• 1:07:23Speaker 01

  It is. It's even more impactful. I hate to say this. I hate to say this. It is more impactful than what you eat. I mean, you obviously cannot out-train a bad diet. That's not going to happen. But you know, this, we have this era of what are the hacks? The only hack is hard work.

• 1:07:45Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:45Speaker 01

  And by building and maintaining skeletal muscle, it is your body armor. That's funny, talking about body armor, sitting across from you, but you get what I'm saying.

• 1:07:56Jocko Willink?

  Yep. It's 100% true. I think that, look, I've gotten injured, you know, I got injured in teams a little bit, got injured in jujitsu a little bit, but from the amount of stuff that I did in the teams and on the mats, not to mention surfing, not to mention skiing, not to mention running around the mountain hunting, all those things to not, to not get injured very often, which again, knock on wood, I'm very lucky. But you get thrown around, torqued around, things go, go where they're not supposed to go. And if you lift weights, You're gonna be that much better off in every aspect of your life.

• 1:08:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it has to be non-negotiable. And this book really puts the science behind it in a different aspect than training or performance, but a medical aspect. When you are out there training and you're contracting skeletal muscle, I had mentioned that it releases these myokines. These myokines interface with the immune system. So you talked about Leila, the woman in the beginning who had rheumatoid arthritis. One of the treatments was exercise. Because when she was contracting her skeletal muscle, these myokines that are released counterbalance the inflammatory process that's happening. But that is not prescribed. In fact, exercise can be optional. Eating can't be, right? Everybody has to eat unless, I don't know, you've got some new fad diet that you've become an aritarian.

• 1:09:19Speaker 01

  But everybody has to eat. But exercise and physical activity. Do you know that 50% of Americans don't exercise? 50%? And then wait, this is really bad. 70% will hit both recommendations for resistance training and 150 minutes of moderate to vigorous activity.

• 1:09:37Jocko Willink?

  Wait, 70% do that?

• 1:09:39Speaker 01

  Do not.

• 1:09:40Jocko Willink?

  Oh, do not do that. So 50% don't work out at all?

• 1:09:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:44Jocko Willink?

  And then 70% don't hit

• 1:09:46Speaker 01

  Any of the

• 1:09:47Jocko Willink?

  the minimum recommended?

• 1:09:49Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:09:49Jocko Willink?

  What are the minimum recommendations?

• 1:09:51Speaker 01

  150 minutes of moderate to vigorous activity.

• 1:09:54Jocko Willink?

  A week?

• 1:09:55Speaker 01

  A week plus two days of resistance training.

• 1:09:57Jocko Willink?

  Okay, yeah. We, for the New Year's, we did this thing, DEF Reset, where it was like, you know, these are the things that you're gonna do. And one of the things that I've talked about with basically making yourself a task list, prioritize and execute. When you read Extreme Ownership, that we were talking about earlier, this one of the laws of combat, the third law of combat leadership is prioritize and execute. So when you prioritize and execute your life, one of the things I've been telling people lately to get a little bit more granular of that is do the strategic things first. Meaning, oh, I've got these four little things that are due today, and I've gotta get them done, so I'm gonna do those first? No. Actually, do those after you do

• 1:10:42Jocko Willink?

  You're trying to write a book. Do that first. You've got a long-term project. You would do that. Do that work first and then do the stuff that's due today. It's reverse psychology. It's counterintuitive because most people think, well, I got this due today. I'll do that and then I'll do the long-term project. No, don't do that. Do the big, long-term strategic stuff first. And what is the most long-term strategic thing that you can do in your life? Take care of your health. So that's why when I wake up in the morning, the first thing I do is workout because you don't notice one workout. You don't notice two workouts. You don't notice three workouts. You don't notice 30 work. Well, you probably noticed 30, but you, you, you don't notice these things and you have to put them first so that you get them done. And this is even

• 1:11:27Jocko Willink?

  more evidence. We're crossing, we're bridging bro science and real science right now. We're bridging. So we're good.

• 1:11:34Speaker 01

  You know, it's the, um, health is the great equalizer. It is the great equalizer. You will never be able to outperform your level of health. And people will say, oh, you can be mentally tough. I take care of people that change the world. That is my mission in life is to care for people that change the world. And I believe I do that very well. The common denominator of how capable and how well they will be able to do their job is not based on how mentally tough they are. It is absolutely based on their health. And it's interesting because the hard chargers drive forward regardless, but I would say that

• 1:12:19Speaker 01

  that's a rookie move. That nothing will take you out faster than a health diagnosis. Eventually not sleeping will keep up, catch up with you, all of these things. And yet, um, people really fail to recognize that that is the foundation.

• 1:12:37Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 1:12:40Jocko Willink?

  All right, let's, let's get into this muscle centric medicine. Going to bring, I haven't said this yet. I usually say this pretty early on. Get the book. We're going to skim like the, the very wave tops of the book, but get the book.

• 1:12:54Jocko Willink?

  Forever Strong. Just go get it. You can get the details, but we're going to hit the highlights of it right now. Here's one of the fundamentals that you talk about and we, we've just been talking about, we'll give you a little details from the book. The life-changing power of skeletal muscle. Skeletal muscle, the muscle that moves bones to control our locomotion, not only constructs our physical architecture, but also impacts our physiological infrastructure. A grossly underestimated resource. Muscle burns fat, drives metabolism, protects against disease and so much more. Near, nearly, and here's the, the bullet points. Nearly immediate improvements measurable within two weeks brought about by increasing muscle health include better blood sugar regulation, hunger control, increased mobility.

• 1:13:37Jocko Willink?

  Next bullet point, long, longer term benefits include a stronger body and stronger bones. Improved blood profile, including lower triglycerides, metabolism protection, increased survivability against nearly every disease and a better mood. Echo, can you confirm that if you're jacked, you have a better mood? Yes, I can confirm.

• 1:13:57Jocko Willink?

  And muscle centric medicine harnesses this powerful system to heal disease, build better body composition, boost energy, increase mobility and combat the conditions associated with aging.

• 1:14:09Jocko Willink?

  So, so that's what we're doing. That's everything that we just talked about. And in the book, you've got a lot of details around more specifically what that looks like and how it works. So, very important.

• 1:14:24Jocko Willink?

  Underestimated thing. Grossly underestimated.

• 1:14:28Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:14:29Jocko Willink?

  You ever, so I surf, you know, and guys that surf, like you're in good shape. If you, if you have a remotely good lifestyle and you surf, there's guys out there that are studs. And they're 45 years old, 50 years old, 55 years old.

• 1:14:49Jocko Willink?

  That's, that's a key component. If you're doing something that is active, that takes strength, you're going to be in such better shape than if you're not. If you, and if you're one of those 50% of people that don't exercise, do like 100%, stop the podcast right now and go start working out. That's what, that's what you should do right now.

• 1:15:07Speaker 01

  It doesn't even have to be complicated, right? It could be, I mean, listen, you should allocate mental resources to a good training plan, but there's absolutely no excuse to not be able to do body weight exercises, whether it's squats or pushups. And, and that all might sound silly, but remember the things that we care about, what are the ultimate endpoints? We care about not getting dementia, right? We care about not getting heart disease. You care about not getting hypertension, obesity, diabetes, type 2 diabetes. I mean, you'll lose your foot, you'll lose your eyesight, destroy your kidneys. These are not diseases all about

• 1:15:51Speaker 01

  obesity. So just hear me out. Obesity is in one part, a symptom of unhealthy skeletal muscle. The greatest prevention and protection against something like Alzheimer's is the health and wellness of your skeletal muscle. So there's no such thing as a healthy sedentary person. People will talk about, oh, if you look in the literature, oh, this healthy sedentary individual, that does not exist. Skeletal muscle was designed to move over time. If it doesn't, we've, you've had like a fatty wagyu steak with like marbling in it.

• 1:16:26Jocko Willink?

  Yes, I certainly have.

• 1:16:28Speaker 01

  I mean, skeletal muscle will look like that. If you are not training and creating this flux and this movement of substrates, whether it's glycogen utilization of the fatty acids in the skeletal muscle, skeletal muscle is almost like a pond. And when that pond becomes stagnant. Fat builds up and it destroys this tissue. But that's not the worst part. The worst part is it's your metabolic sink. And if you can appreciate that Alzheimer's is type 3 diabetes of the brain. Again, they're genetic.

• 1:17:04Jocko Willink?

  Is that, is that from current literature right now? Are people saying that?

• 1:17:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:17:09Jocko Willink?

  That Alzheimer's is type 3.

• 1:17:11Speaker 01

  Diabetes of the brain. It's in, it's in part. Um, I graduated my fellowship in 2015. Um, did I graduate in 2015? Yes, I did. And, um, at that time, it, there was a lot more discussion about the metabolic implications. And now it certainly has an uptick in people's understanding. You know, these diseases of aging, people believe they just happen to us. Alzheimer's and cardiovascular disease, these challenges begin in your 30s. These are not, and even sarcopenia, which is the loss of muscle mass and function, which we've, uh, many of us have witnessed our parents or grandparents getting skinnier and scrawnier.

• 1:17:54Speaker 01

  While there are certain changes that happen in skeletal muscle, um, when these changes happen, these are when we see the uptick in metabolic dysregulation. If we can maintain the health of skeletal muscle, then it allows us to maintain a healthy metabolism. What do I mean by that? Quite simply, again, you had mentioned it, blood sugar regulation, blood glucose, insulin, triglycerides. These are all dependent on the health of skeletal muscle. When that skeletal muscle declines, you will see fatty infiltration. You will also see a rise in blood glucose, potentially a rise in, um, insulin, triglycerides, et cetera.

• 1:18:34Speaker 01

  This becomes very destructive to the brain, to heart health, to, um, arterial health. And again, we're always looking outward for the quote, "solution."

• 1:18:45Speaker 01

  I would argue that it's about pulling back to look at the foundation and we have to have other physicians and other individuals begin to speak about this as opposed to chasing fat and prescribing more Ozempic and Monjaro, which are all great drugs, but there has to be some accountability.

• 1:19:06Jocko Willink?

  How does Ozempic work?

• 1:19:07Speaker 01

  It's a GLP-1 agonist and so basically what that does that mean is it stimulates, it does a number of things, but it decreases hunger tremendously. It makes your body feel as if it's full. It changes gut motility so food stays in your system longer. There is a potential that it browns white fat. I do think that it is a very good drug and we use it in my practice. There's a lot of discussion about how it destroys skeletal muscle mass. We don't see that because our patients, they're training. They are training, they are eating dietary protein, but what's so interesting, and I don't want to be a conspiracy theorist, but I think the pushback against Ozempic is if

• 1:19:52Speaker 01

  people aren't hungry, they're not buying junk food. They're not buying the...

• 1:19:58Jocko Willink?

  Oh, so you're saying that?

• 1:20:00Speaker 01

  I believe.

• 1:20:01Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:20:02Speaker 01

  So, and I'm gonna tell you why I think this is true.

• 1:20:04Jocko Willink?

  Hostess is against Ozempic.

• 1:20:07Speaker 01

  I will tell you why I think this is true because when you look at the marketing budgets, whoever has the money has the microphone. And this whole confusion around dietary protein, which, let's say beef, I'm just gonna pick on beef, whether it's beef, dairy, eggs, etc., they are all commodities. They're whole foods. They are under the jurisdiction of the USDA, which means if I say to you, let's just play a game, beef, you say, what's for dinner? If I say milk, what do you say?

• 1:20:40Jocko Willink?

  Cool.

• 1:20:41Speaker 01

  Does the body go?

• 1:20:42Jocko Willink?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:20:43Speaker 01

  I'm gonna ask Echo, I'm gonna switch my... Okay, if I say pork, what do you say?

• 1:20:49Jocko Willink?

  The other, other white meat?

• 1:20:51Speaker 01

  See, nailed it. We could put you on Jeopardy. Notice that they're one-liners. They're one-liners and they don't say anything disparaging against, milk doesn't say, wow, this is the worst, this is so much better than almond juice. So the commodities are all put together with small farms. For the most part, they're, you don't know, you just hear milk.

• 1:21:15Jocko Willink?

  Does the body go?

• 1:21:16Speaker 01

  Right, but there's a ton of different milk farmers, etc., dairy farmers.

• 1:21:20Jocko Willink?

  But they united to make that.

• 1:21:22Speaker 01

  Exactly. They unite, they pool other resources together, and collectively, a commodity, which is a whole food, has a marketing budget of 750 million. Like, that's it. And they can not say anything disparaging against other foods. Like, you can't say, wow, almond juice sucks. We're a much better choice. Whereas processed foods, once it is processed, it's under a different jurisdiction, like the FTC or whatever it is, and they can say, wow, almond milk is so much better for the planet. This is a great source of X, Y, and Z. So it can make these claims that can also potentially be totally erroneous. But one company, let's say PepsiCo, has a marketing budget of, I don't know, over $2 billion.

• 1:22:08Speaker 01

  So these narratives that come out, one must understand who is controlling the markets that we're seeing and who is controlling the information. The Meatless Mondays, etc.

• 1:22:21Jocko Willink?

  Is that a thing, too?

• 1:22:23Speaker 01

  Yes, that's a thing. That is a thing.

• 1:22:26Jocko Willink?

  It's not a thing for me.

• 1:22:28Speaker 01

  And that's why I appreciate it. And the reason I bring this up is because we are, I wrote this book to provide a good, evidence-based foundation for understanding, and also an understanding of the mouse with the microphone, of all these, you know, maybe this one or two major companies that will influence our health and influence the choices that we're making.

• 1:22:55Jocko Willink?

  So, speaking of protein, I'm gonna fast forward into the book again. I wanna hit the highlights of this. Protein, more than just a macronutrient. Roughly 60% of your body is water. Half of the remaining 40% is protein. Your bones, ligaments, tendons, liver, brain, skin, and fingernails are all built from proteins. But this vital macronutrient is responsible for far more than just physical structures. Proteins are the master regulators of all that is happening in your body, controlling function in all tissues and organs, including muscle. They include enzymes, a class of proteins that catalyze all chemical reactions within the body. Proteins also support energy production and cell-to-cell communication. Proteins facilitate critical cellular functions, including balancing hormones, and serve as vital immune system mediators.

• 1:23:40Jocko Willink?

  Antibodies that inactivate pathogens as part of your immune response are a type of protein, as are many hormones, including insulin. The thyroid hormones, which help regulate your blood glucose and metabolic rate can impact and can impact growth hormone secretion and bone health are made from amino acids provided by proteins. The brain uses protein-rich foods to produce neurotransmitters such as endorphin, norepinephrine, or no, epinephrine, norepinephrine, dopamine, and serotonin, which are essential to brain cell communication. These chemicals are directly linked to neurological development, sleep, and mood regulation. Benefits of protein-forward diet: balanced blood sugar, increased energy, mental clarity, decreased body fat,

• 1:24:23Jocko Willink?

  improved body composition, reduced cravings. By now, I hope you're clear on the vital role that protein plays beyond just building new muscle. There's no getting around its role in all the body's systems. These functions make protein critical for longevity, metabolic function, and quality of life.

• 1:24:46Jocko Willink?

  And here's why you shouldn't ignore protein. It is essential for cellular functions, influences metabolism, needed to build structures, need to build physical structures, impacts sleep and mood, needed for brain, bone, ligaments, tendon, skin, and fingernails. So, these are the things that protein are doing. And it's weird that it does all this. And like I said, for back in the day, it wasn't really part of the conversation other than...

• 1:25:14Jocko Willink?

  We're drinking some protein shakes when we're lifting heavy to get a little bit stronger. But other than that, conversation used to be about fat, proteins, or sorry, fat and carbohydrates. Don't know fat's bad, no carbohydrate's bad, but your emphasis is protein forward.

• 1:25:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right. And it's interesting, there is something called the protein leverage hypothesis. Have you heard of that? I would have been very, very impressed.

• 1:25:38Jocko Willink?

  Protein lever?

• 1:25:39Speaker 01

  Protein leverage hypothesis. And this is the idea that one reason obesity is the way that it is, is that a human will feed until they get enough protein. So if you are eating highly processed foods that are lower in protein, you will continue to eat to meet this protein need. Because again, we eat protein, but we really need those amino acids. There's 20 different amino acids. Uh, nobody, I don't think on the podcast wants to hear about all 20, but uh, so I'll save everybody. They're in the book. Um, so I'll save everybody that painful discussion, but at the end of the day, these amino acids all do different things. And so we're eating for individual amino acids.

• 1:26:21Speaker 01

  Um, and that is something that we have to appreciate. And that is where kind of this idea of being protein forward comes in, is that a human will feed to get those amino acids.

• 1:26:35Jocko Willink?

  And keep feeding.

• 1:26:36Speaker 01

  And keep eating. Uh, there's a certain, and we see it across animals, that they'll go for, you know, closer to 20% protein. Again, humans, we can go higher certainly, and I typically don't think about it as a percentage. It's really a number. We shouldn't really think about, when we construct a diet, we shouldn't necessarily think about percentages. Because again, if someone is eating a thousand calories versus 2,000 calories, the percentages are going to mean different things. Um, so.

• 1:27:09Jocko Willink?

  And in the book, you start talking about how much protein you should aim for.

• 1:27:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:27:15Jocko Willink?

  So what's, what's your calculation?

• 1:27:17Speaker 01

  Well, I'm just going to say this, it should be around one gram per pound, ideal body weight. The, so if you're, how much do you weigh?

• 1:27:25Jocko Willink?

  Two twenty-five.

• 1:27:26Speaker 01

  Great. Two twenty-five, two hundred and twenty-five grams of protein, or at least two hundred. Um, do you know how many grams of protein you ate?

• 1:27:35Jocko Willink?

  No.

• 1:27:36Speaker 01

  Be interesting to see what you naturally are doing.

• 1:27:40Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it would be interesting to see. Um, what'd you say, two hundred? Let's say you're supposed to get two hundred?

• 1:27:46Speaker 01

  Yeah. I think we should, we should track it and, and do, and, and see.

• 1:27:52Jocko Willink?

  I eat a lot of protein.

• 1:27:53Speaker 01

  Great.

• 1:27:54Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I eat a lot of protein. I have protein shakes. I have protein ready to drinks and I eat steak. And I do that a lot. And I do that on a daily basis. So we're over here eating protein, but I'll get back to you. I'll.

• 1:28:09Speaker 01

  I'd love to know.

• 1:28:10Jocko Willink?

  I actually, I just looked this up the other day. How much protein is in a sixteen ounce Rebi? Do you know off the top of your head?

• 1:28:16Speaker 01

  Around, so if you multiply, what's sixteen times seven? What is that number?

• 1:28:22Jocko Willink?

  Uh, now we're doing math.

• 1:28:23Speaker 01

  Okay, so sixteen, sixteen times seven, so seven is two, seven, eight, ninety-two grams of protein.

• 1:28:30Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:31Speaker 01

  Um, so it's probably a little bit lower because of the fat, so the, the sixteen ounces, um, will be a little bit lower.

• 1:28:38Jocko Willink?

  The protein, my guess is I'm probably going to be pretty close. I bet you I'm pretty close to two hundred a day, which is pretty cool.

• 1:28:44Speaker 01

  Which is very interesting. And I will mention that the RDA, again, the recommended dietary allowance is set at point three seven grams per pound.

• 1:28:55Jocko Willink?

  I'm protein forward and I've been protein forward for a long time.

• 1:28:59Speaker 01

  Cause it supports training, it supports recovery, it supports all of the things. And you've tuned out the noise and likely done what you felt the best as.

• 1:29:09Jocko Willink?

  Do you feel like, um, cause you said ideal body weight, like let's say, okay, I'm two twenty-five as well, but I'm thinking in my mind, I'm like, wait a minute. Or 215, that would be really my ideal weight. Is that kinda how I ca- cause a lot of people there those that discrepancy is bigger, you know?

• 1:29:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're pretty close and really fit. They again, it is so.

• 1:29:33Speaker 01

  You guys are terrible.

• 1:29:36Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. When the mics are off.

• 1:29:40Speaker 01

  One gram per pound, ideal body weight would work, but there's no what I what I do want to point out is there's a lot of myths around dietary protein that if you were to over consume protein, which we actually don't have a number for that. Let's say you told me you're eating 500 grams. I mean, I couldn't say that for some reason that that would be bad. I wouldn't have evidence to support that. There's a feeding studies that go above, you know, closer to 3.3 grams per kg.

• 1:30:06Jocko Willink?

  And what does that do to somebody?

• 1:30:07Speaker 01

  Nothing. In fact.

• 1:30:09Jocko Willink?

  Bad outcome?

• 1:30:10Speaker 01

  It's improved body composition. So they have lost body fat and they have increased lean mass. There's no data to support that protein is bad for healthy kidneys or bone. Those are the common myths and for any women listening to the podcast, it's not going to make you bulky. Which is all we ever hear about, but um

• 1:30:34Speaker 01

  it would be very difficult to overeat protein and it's also very difficult to gain weight on eating protein and the average male is eating around 100 grams of protein a day.

• 1:30:45Jocko Willink?

  Oh.

• 1:30:46Speaker 01

  That is, that's what the average is eating.

• 1:30:49Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's not, that's not gonna be good. Now, does that number go up if we're if we're working out really hard?

• 1:30:55Speaker 01

  I think one gram per pound, ideal body weight will cover you.

• 1:30:58Jocko Willink?

  Cover you, okay.

• 1:31:00Speaker 01

  But you could go higher. You depending on if you eat carbohydrates or not, that is good for muscle glycogen. It's good for recovery. So it's just a matter of how many calories that you can allot to, I was listening to one of your guys talk downstairs. He's like, I'm eating 5,000 calories a day.

• 1:31:19Jocko Willink?

  He's probably training super hard, maybe getting ready for a fight or something.

• 1:31:21Speaker 01

  I think he is.

• 1:31:22Jocko Willink?

  And maybe even like 5,000 calories a day, he might be, yeah. Like sometimes you have guys trying to maintain their weight through train, through camp, through fight camp and it can be hard because you're doing two days, three days.

• 1:31:33Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 1:31:33Jocko Willink?

  It gets a little crazy.

• 1:31:34Speaker 01

  And so for how you would allocate calories is I wouldn't go below one gram per pound, ideal body weight because he's also going to have to get calories in, whether it's carbohydrates or fats, he's still gonna have to get more calories.

• 1:31:46Jocko Willink?

  You mentioned carbohydrates. We're going to fast forward to carbohydrates. Now, listen, again, there's so much detail in the book about protein, about the impact, about how to eat it. So get the book for that. But you mentioned carbohydrates and you say, it's no wonder that carbs have such a bad rap today in today's culture. Mouthwatering starches and sugars can make everything from grandma's cookies to your favorite breakfast scones addictive. They trigger cravings and are so, so easy to overconsume. Most Americans get more than 50% of their calories from carbohydrates and our collective overeating of starchy, sugary, refined carbs has devastating effects on our metabolism, resulting in rampant obesity,

• 1:32:31Jocko Willink?

  insulin resistance, and type 2 diabetes. That's what's going on with carbs. You're, you're not a person in this book that's like a carb hater.

• 1:32:43Speaker 01

  Not at all. You gotta earn it, though.

• 1:32:46Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. You talk about the fact that your body can make the glucose that it needs. Because there's, again, when I was talking about sometimes back in the day when I would get my, some of my wife's friends would get hostile with me.

• 1:32:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:32:59Jocko Willink?

  And they would be like, your brain needs glucose. And I would say, no, it doesn't. You can fuel it with ketones. But you, you, you do mention that your body can make what it needs.

• 1:33:12Jocko Willink?

  Quality carbs. You, you talk about that as well. So talk to me about carbs. What's your, what's your assessment? What do you need? How do you earn it? What if you don't earn it?

• 1:33:20Speaker 01

  You're gonna get fat. There's no nice way to say it. The average American eats 300 grams of carbs a day and doesn't exercise. We know what's happening there. I will say carbohydrates are not bad. I am a higher carb person because I like to train and I can burn it. The idea of eating less processed foods makes a lot of sense because processed foods tend to be highly palatable. If I were to give you hostess or ho-hos, whatever you want to call them, it would probably be easy to eat a lot of that. I recommend individuals, if they are metabolically healthy.

• 1:34:02Speaker 01

  You could do a one to one ratio of protein to carbs. If you are healthy and you are training, anything above that has to be earned. Now, if you are metabolically unhealthy, if you are struggling with weight, if you are overweight, if you have abnormal blood markers, you could start at 90 grams of carbohydrates a day. I wouldn't totally do an Atkins tank you out. That doesn't seem to work well for people. Again, I've seen thousands of people. It just doesn't work well.

• 1:34:30Speaker 01

  Choosing-

• 1:34:31Jocko Willink?

  So is 90 grams sort of like a average of what it takes to function as a human?

• 1:34:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's where that, that, smart, smart man, that's where it came from. So if I were to make a, you know, I try to make recommendations that I could back up by science. If I were to say, go zero carbohydrates. Again, I'm a physician. So what is going to work for most people? And how can I put them in a position to succeed? Once I get their buy-in, then we can begin to execute and I can push them further. Starting at 90 grams, easy. So for individuals who don't have big appetites, if you're doing 30 grams three times a day, I mean, that would be nothing for you guys, but it could be a place to start. So if we already know that 50% of Americans are not working out,

• 1:35:18Speaker 01

  they're not utilizing or turning over the swamp pool that is also known as muscle, then anything above that number, you begin to earn.

• 1:35:30Jocko Willink?

  And how do you earn more? Working out more?

• 1:35:32Speaker 01

  You train, yeah.

• 1:35:34Jocko Willink?

  What are the, when you're taking in carbohydrates, what are your, what you put in the book as quality carbs? You talk about vegetables, berries, beans and lentils. Is that our good carbs?

• 1:35:46Speaker 01

  High fiber, but for the guys that are listening here that are doing heavy training, absolutely, they should be having rice or potatoes or anything to refuel.

• 1:35:57Speaker 01

  I love choosing carbohydrates that also have fiber. I would say not necessarily around training because we want that faster absorption. The training individuals that are training and don't cringe, but you know, like my husband, who's training for this marathon. He's, oh, I didn't tell you that. He's running the Boston Marathon.

• 1:36:15Jocko Willink?

  Oh, awesome.

• 1:36:15Speaker 01

  He ran the New York Marathon.

• 1:36:17Jocko Willink?

  Did you have to call for the New York Marathon?

• 1:36:19Speaker 01

  Um, well, he got off the couch and ran it. It was a terrible idea.

• 1:36:23Jocko Willink?

  Wait, he got off the couch?

• 1:36:25Speaker 01

  And ran the New York Marathon.

• 1:36:26Jocko Willink?

  So wait, don't, don't you have to qualify for the New York Marathon?

• 1:36:28Speaker 01

  He runs it.

• 1:36:29Jocko Willink?

  Or did he have some kind of like hookup?

• 1:36:31Speaker 01

  He, oh, no, he always runs it for, um, I think he ran it for the Glenn Doherty Foundation.

• 1:36:36Jocko Willink?

  Okay, awesome. Yeah, I was gonna say they have like,

• 1:36:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:36:39Jocko Willink?

  Cause I think it's a marathon that you have to qualify for unless you're doing it for some charity organization, something like that.

• 1:36:44Speaker 01

  So he ran, he ran the New York Marathon for Glenn Doherty.

• 1:36:47Jocko Willink?

  Awesome.

• 1:36:48Speaker 01

  Anyway, he got off the couch and ran that. It was a terrible idea.

• 1:36:51Jocko Willink?

  How, how'd he do?

• 1:36:53Speaker 01

  I think he did pretty, pretty well.

• 1:36:55Jocko Willink?

  Really?

• 1:36:55Speaker 01

  I, I think it was.

• 1:36:56Jocko Willink?

  Was he a runner growing up?

• 1:36:57Speaker 01

  No, he's kind of built like a tree trunk kind of a guy. Um, so no.

• 1:37:01Jocko Willink?

  So he's not a runner?

• 1:37:02Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:37:02Jocko Willink?

  And he just got off the couch and ran the marathon?

• 1:37:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:37:04Jocko Willink?

  You remember what his time was?

• 1:37:07Speaker 01

  Is it like 4:20 a good time?

• 1:37:09Jocko Willink?

  Like three is a solid time.

• 1:37:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't know.

• 1:37:12Jocko Willink?

  Three is really solid.

• 1:37:13Speaker 01

  I, yeah, I'd have to, I'd have to.

• 1:37:16Jocko Willink?

  But off the couch?

• 1:37:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:37:17Jocko Willink?

  You know, and he did this while he was in medical school? Yeah. Off the couch, 4:20, we're giving him full credit.

• 1:37:23Speaker 01

  I bet it's probably not 4:20. He's gonna kill me and he's gonna be like, I can't believe you said that. I'd do so much better.

• 1:37:27Jocko Willink?

  He did it in 2:40? Okay, awesome.

• 1:37:30Speaker 01

  It was really funny. I go, I go, how was that? He's like, ah, I've done harder things.

• 1:37:33Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:33Speaker 01

  He's like, but that was stupid. Next time I'll train for it. So he's run the Boston Marathon and he's gonna, uh, run it again.

• 1:37:40Jocko Willink?

  That's awesome.

• 1:37:40Speaker 01

  Um, he's kind of training for this one. But anyway, for him, he cannot seem to get by without doing some kind of glucose pack. It's just, he's struggling. He's also getting up at four and then running before he goes to work and, uh, I hear you know something about that, but the 4 a.m. wake up, um.

• 1:37:59Speaker 01

  So if you are not trying to just simply refuel choosing carbohydrates that have a high fiber ratio, if you're just really focused on body composition, that would be better. And of course phytonutrients. I remember when I was dating my husband, I went to base. And on on post, the food choices there were so bad. It was like Domino's.

• 1:38:20Jocko Willink?

  Subway.

• 1:38:21Speaker 01

  Subway. What else is there?

• 1:38:23Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, then there'd be like the the PX shop.

• 1:38:26Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:38:27Jocko Willink?

  The Navy Exchange.

• 1:38:28Speaker 01

  Exchange.

• 1:38:28Jocko Willink?

  Which just has a bunch of junk food in it, yeah.

• 1:38:30Speaker 01

  And I'm just thinking, how are people surviving? I'm like Rip It's and Baby Ruth?

• 1:38:38Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, well, yeah.

• 1:38:40Speaker 01

  So they, it's pretty simple. Carbohydrates are very straightforward. We shouldn't demonize it. I will say, though, if you're not training, anything above 50 grams of carbs at one dose is not ideal.

• 1:38:50Jocko Willink?

  What happens after more than 50 grams?

• 1:38:52Speaker 01

  You'll, you can drop your blood sugar. And so you'll increase insulin, increase glucose. And then you're tired. So if you are the kind of person that eats and then 90 minutes later, you're tanked out, then I would consider reducing your carbohydrate load at that time.

• 1:39:07Jocko Willink?

  Yep, that's such a, you should be looking at your diet. This is for when people ask me like, well, you don't sleep very much and all this stuff. First of all, I sleep enough. But also, like, I eat clean. And I know when I don't eat clean, I feel like crap. And I feel like I want to go to sleep. Well, why is that? Because you're eating like crap. So when people are like, oh, I just, I don't have enough energy if I don't get enough sleep. It's like, cool, sleep more, yes. But also, what are you eating? Because if you're eating junk, you're going to feel like junk. That's the way it works.

• 1:39:34Jocko Willink?

  So there's carbohydrates. Again, the details are in the books. Get the books. The other macronutrient we got to hit is fat. You've got the skinny on fat. Fear of fats is the 800-pound gorilla behind the US dietary guidelines. No matter how science changes, federal policymakers still seem to act as if fats are the root of all evil. Since the early 1970s, healthcare professionals have obsessed over the idea that fats. And cholesterol contribute to virtually all health problems, including heart disease, obesity, diabetes, and cancer. While the fat theory might seem logical, the evidence is based on educated guesses, assumptions, and personal beliefs. After nearly 50 years

• 1:40:14Jocko Willink?

  of research, the case against dietary fat has yet to been proven to be proven. In fact, the evidence gets weaker with each passing day. And then you go on to say that many popular diets recommend restricting dietary fat overall and avoiding saturated fats, mostly because fats have a higher calorie content, nine calories per gram versus, what is it, four and four?

• 1:40:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:40:38Jocko Willink?

  But fats also have a higher satiety value, meaning they tend to leave you feeling full, unlike carbohydrates, which can make you hungry, convincing you that there's always room for dessert even when you're stuffed. Remember, weight management and body fat are determined by the number of calories you eat. That's why it's so important to master balancing your macronutrients for optimal health.

• 1:41:01Speaker 01

  So you know, they took cholesterol out of the guidelines? There was this, oh, you should only have 300 milligrams of cholesterol a day. You know, they took that out of the guidelines. I think they took it out 2015. And you still go to the doctor today, and the doctor will say, reduce your dietary cholesterol.

• 1:41:18Jocko Willink?

  Oh, you're saying they took it out because they actually realized that this didn't need to be in there?

• 1:41:22Speaker 01

  Correct. That the body makes cholesterol, and that dietary cholesterol doesn't necessarily raise your blood level cholesterol.

• 1:41:31Jocko Willink?

  When you say doesn't necessarily?

• 1:41:33Speaker 01

  I think that, and I say it cautiously, the dietary cholesterol does not affect your blood level cholesterol. You make it, and you have somewhat of a cholesterol set point.

• 1:41:45Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you've got like a genetic cholesterol.

• 1:41:47Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly. So that is why I said it that way. And they took it out of the guidelines, yet people are still saying, oh, you should watch your cholesterol intake. Why? That is just an example of something that we've heard repeated over and over again, to mean truth when it doesn't. Cholesterol is made by the body. And again, like you had mentioned, there is a genetic set point. I will say saturated fat, they just came up with a number. The case against saturated fat is not good. The recommendation is...

• 1:42:19Jocko Willink?

  Wait, the case against it?

• 1:42:21Speaker 01

  Is not good.

• 1:42:22Jocko Willink?

  Is not strong, meaning that when they say saturated fat is bad? They're not correct.

• 1:42:29Speaker 01

  Well, saturated fat could be a problem if you are overeating. If you are overeating, then saturated fat can be a problem. But if you are not overeating and your calories are in check, then saturated in fat is not a problem. There are certain genetic, for certain people, it can be a problem, but you'll know that pretty quickly.

• 1:42:53Jocko Willink?

  And how you know that?

• 1:42:54Speaker 01

  You'll see changes in abnormal lipid panels. But again, it really is a much bigger picture because there's lean mass hyper responders. There are a whole host of people that do well on higher levels of saturated fat. It really depends. So they kind of picked this number of 10% and then 30% fat out of the air. There wasn't, there's not really great evidence. So basically what they did is they said 45 to 65% of your diet should be carbohydrates. This is what they say, again, driven by policy. These are not all scientific decisions. These are decisions.

• 1:43:34Jocko Willink?

  Just guidelines after some committee got together and.

• 1:43:37Speaker 01

  That takes funding from processed food companies, from, you know, industry. And then they kept dietary protein the same, which is the only macronutrients whose need changes as you age. So your mom should have a higher protein intake than she had 10 years ago. But they've kept those numbers the same as the minimum to prevent deficiencies. And then they'll say, okay, well, you know, 30% of your diet can be fat. And just kind of make up this number. Exactly. Right? Maybe, maybe it's less and maybe 10% will come from saturated fat. But it is, again, they kind of made these numbers up.

• 1:44:17Jocko Willink?

  Got it. Again, you've got, I'm literally reading two paragraphs out of entire sections of the book. So if you want to get the details of this information, get the book. And then on top of that, you have like meal planning in the book, which obviously I'm not going to read meal plans. I'm not going to read the recipes, but you've got some good examples and quite a few good examples like, hey, here's something you can eat. Here's what a, what a breakfast would look like. Here's, and one of the things, and I don't know if I've highlighted this or not in the book. So I'm just going to say it right now. Like the cornerstone of your meals is 30 grams of protein.

• 1:44:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's the minimum.

• 1:44:54Jocko Willink?

  That's like what you're doing. You're gonna have, you're gonna have breakfast? Cool. You start with 30 grams of protein. You also talk about eating the protein first, which I think is smart.

• 1:45:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, that because then you're not hungry. And there's really great data that individuals that have protein first, and you image their brain, they're much less likely to go for the donuts or the cupcakes because of the effect of, you're licking it.

• 1:45:15Jocko Willink?

  You haven't heard this. This guy over here, like, two months ago, he had, what was it? Uh, what app did you use?

• 1:45:24Speaker 02

  DoorDash.

• 1:45:25Jocko Willink?

  He used DoorDash to have a dozen Krispy Kreme donuts delivered to his house and he ate eight of them.

• 1:45:31Speaker 01

  You did? Well, listen, if you're gonna do that, at least have your protein first, because then you would have had seven.

• 1:45:38Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, this is a full breakdown.

• 1:45:40Speaker 01

  I just wanna know, how did you find that out?

• 1:45:42Jocko Willink?

  He, he confessed. Look, sometimes I gotta talk to him, you know? And we get, we have ways of making him talk, but, you know, he admitted it. He knew it was wrong. He knew it was wrong. We, we talked about it. We got through it. We're not gonna let it happen again for a while.

• 1:45:57Speaker 01

  But let me ask you this. The next day, were you more hungry for carbs?

• 1:46:00Speaker 02

  Uh, see, and we talked about that too, where it doesn't really jam me up, which is kind of a catch 22. So he was like, oh, how'd you feel afterwards? And I was like, I felt normal.

• 1:46:09Speaker 01

  I should have, I should have eaten the other.

• 1:46:12Jocko Willink?

  Hold on. He said, I felt normal. I said, what'd you do? He goes, well, I laid on the couch and I felt, I said, he said, I kinda fell asleep. I was like, what do you mean you kinda? He goes, well, I don't really remember what happened. So he went into full like brain coma.

• 1:46:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, put it this way, it didn't jam me up like how people say, oh, I don't like mess you up.

• 1:46:31Speaker 01

  So you ate back to your normal way of eating the next day?

• 1:46:33Speaker 02

  Yes, ma'am, I did. Yeah, we talked about that too. Whereas like, I, and the thing is, I do believe that and I, I'm sure I feel that somewhere. But, yeah, when you're like, you have it planned out, you're like, yeah, I'm gonna pound these donuts and then I'm gonna go back living my normal life.

• 1:46:47Speaker 01

  So you threw away the other four?

• 1:46:49Speaker 02

  No, I give them to my nephew. Or he had, I think he had like two.

• 1:46:52Speaker 01

  I wanna know what was gonna happen if he had those other four. I bet y'all.

• 1:46:55Speaker 02

  It's very possible. Yeah, but.

• 1:46:56Jocko Willink?

  Oh, the next day, you mean?

• 1:46:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, like I might get into them. Yeah, but, but do you, and this is probably part of the holistic kind of situation where this is what I feel more so than I feel, oh, the craving for those donuts in the back fridge or whatever. I feel like, oh, wait a second. This is one of the rare times they're around. It's not like this is gonna become a habit or nothing because it's not like I'm gonna go back and get more donuts.

• 1:47:23Speaker 02

  That is true, but it's less likely, see what I'm saying? Then, but then when you're like, oh yeah, this is kind of an opportune time. You know, like, you know, it's basically the psychology of having junk food around versus not around. So then it's like, okay, well, they're here, they're not always here, let me pawn these and move on, you know, kind of a thing. But if they're not there.

• 1:47:42Speaker 01

  It's never as good as you think it's gonna be. And I, I think people hold out for, you know, I always think, what are the things that really trip people up is they have this idea that it's the last meal or the, oh, the thing that is gonna be so good and they dream about it and then they think about it, but it's, it's like this hedonic reward. It's never as good.

• 1:48:01Speaker 02

  I would say, well, put it this way, in the spirit of accuracy, it is rarely as good. Because every once in a while, like this one time, I mean, not, not that, you know, but this one time I was like, hey, I'm gonna, you know, I'm gonna have this cheat day. Or it's more of a cheat meal, I'm gonna do the whole day.

• 1:48:14Speaker 01

  Cheat day, really?

• 1:48:16Speaker 02

  But the cheat meal, I'm gonna say, okay, I'm gonna go to Jack in the Box. Back in the day, I used to get Jack in the Box, the sourdough one.

• 1:48:21Jocko Willink?

  We called that jacked in the box.

• 1:48:27Speaker 02

  Nonetheless, I get the Jack in the Box, bro, it comes and it's all fresh and it fulfilled my expectations. But aside from that, like even the Krispy Kremes, it didn't really fulfill, you're right. It rarely is like what you like really wanted and anticipated to be.

• 1:48:41Speaker 01

  And then we forget, and then we forget as humans, uh, there's this hedonic reward and it's the hedonic treadmill. You think that that next donut and then all of a sudden there's diminishing returns because I guarantee you by donut number six, you're like, this was a dumbass idea. This is like, uh, it doesn't even taste good.

• 1:48:56Jocko Willink?

  He was just laying on the couch with powdered sugar all over his face. Just curled up in a ball.

• 1:49:01Speaker 02

  The thing is, I, I see how that can be, but I, I do feel like in my specific case, it was different just because, bro, I know what I'm doing. And I know like tomorrow, it's not gonna be like that, it's not like that. This is not a new thing necessarily, like a new pattern that I'm gonna like, you know.

• 1:49:17Jocko Willink?

  I got a, I got a protocol, uh, recently implemented protocol. I don't, I don't implement new protocols very often, but I've had a protocol that I've had for a long time, which is if I feel like I need a day off.

• 1:49:29Jocko Willink?

  I won't take it today. I'll take it tomorrow. So if I'm like, yeah, I don't really feel like working out today. I think I might be tired and I probably need some rest day and all the the literature says that you need to rest more and you just tell yourself all these things. If I go through that and I say, yep, I'm definitely need a day off, then I say, cool. You get to take it tomorrow. But I still gotta do the work today. So then I go do the work and guess what? The next day you feel fine and you get through it.

• 1:49:52Speaker 02

  That works.

• 1:49:52Jocko Willink?

  I actually just implemented this.

• 1:49:56Jocko Willink?

  If you want to eat something really good, like out outs, that's not on the path. You can do it. You gotta get it tomorrow. You gotta wait till tomorrow.

• 1:50:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:50:06Jocko Willink?

  And that right there, generally speaking, like I've been in January, I was like, oh, I'm fired up. I'm gonna get a pizza at the end of January. I'm gonna get a like a deluxe, just super good pizza. I'm gonna go to the pizza restaurant. Like we're, we're gonna do this whole thing.

• 1:50:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:50:22Jocko Willink?

  And right now I still haven't gotten it. Cause I've, I got through, like I, I say, I'll do it tomorrow. And I just keep saying, I'll do it tomorrow. And then I realized the next day, I'm like, oh yeah, I don't want to do that. And then two weeks later, I'm like, oh, I want to get that pizza. And then I go, okay, I'll do it tomorrow. Tomorrow you're cleared hot. But then I get to tomorrow. I'm like, I don't want to do that.

• 1:50:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:50:43Jocko Willink?

  Cause I don't want to fall off the path.

• 1:50:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, I could see that.

• 1:50:46Jocko Willink?

  So it's a good little protocol, implementing the same protocol for days off of work. Working out, implement the same protocol. If you want to freaking just go haywire with the damn eight Krispy Kremes.

• 1:50:59Speaker 01

  And have you ever, have you ever gone off the path?

• 1:51:02Jocko Willink?

  Oh yeah. Yeah. I mean, I, I eat, I'm totally normal. Like, I mean, I'll definitely eat. Like if there's a good pizza out there, I'm chocolate chip cookies. Let's go. We make more chocolate chip cookies, which actually do a really good job of filling the gap on that. To me, like my protein shakes taste like dessert. So I'm very, uh, what's the word? Very gratified and satisfied. When, when, like when I get done eating steak and salad, I have some kind of meat and some kind of salad basically every night. And I have Caesar salad or I have.

• 1:51:37Jocko Willink?

  Some kind of vinaigrette, you know, like, what is it? It's, it's balsamic vinegar and olive oil. Very fancy. It ain't that fancy. I put them in a thing and I mix them and I put them on a piece of salad. And I eat it. But when I get done with that, sometimes the sweet tooth is still there. Protein shake all day. I'll have a chocolate milk protein shake and I've, that's good to go. That's, that's totally satisfying. I have hot chocolate. I, so I take protein powder, milk protein powder, put it in, I put it in the hot milk. And I make, I make monk fruit whipped cream. Actually, my wife makes it. She takes monk fruit. Really good. She takes monk fruit and she whips it in whipped cream and it's delicious.

• 1:52:21Jocko Willink?

  And it's, tastes like regular whipped cream, but that, all those things are really, really good. So, yeah, if I'm, but you know, if I'm like out with my kids and we're at some awesome restaurant and they're like, hey, we have tiramisu for dessert. Like tiramisu is not something you can get. That's not, you know, your family, your wife's not making tiramisu.

• 1:52:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's not just cruisy.

• 1:52:47Jocko Willink?

  It's not, yeah. It's not like, oh, I'm gonna run, like I can't pull it out of the cabinet.

• 1:52:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:52:51Jocko Willink?

  So if there's a, a situation like that, we call that a situation, right? Am I gonna get into that, uh, am I gonna get into that tiramisu or whatever? So, yeah, I'm not some, I'm not crazy. I'm not obsessed with food. Uh, I don't even, I don't even like, some people love food, right? Like I will take no time, like people that like barbecuing and they marinate it all day and all that stuff. I don't do any of that. If it was up to me, I would just, I would eat like chicken from a can and mayonnaise. And that's like, I'm, I put nuts in there and that's like a great meal to me. It tastes fine. Do I enjoy having awesome steak? A hundred percent. Do I wanna cook it and clean it and all that other stuff? Not really. No. So I'm, uh, I'd say, you know, that's kinda me. I have, um,

• 1:53:36Jocko Willink?

  You know, I have chocolate, like eighty percent chocolate, which is pretty low in sugar. You know, I eat that. That's very gratifying to me. I find that if you go below seventy percent, you want more. It's like you can actually tell. Seventy percent chocolate, you want more chocolate. Eighty percent or higher, you have like two squares and you're like, okay, I'm.

• 1:53:55Speaker 01

  No, thanks. You're good.

• 1:53:56Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you're good. Cause it tastes good, but it doesn't taste that good. And it probably lacks the whatever.

• 1:54:02Speaker 01

  Sweetness.

• 1:54:02Jocko Willink?

  The sweetness for the mental dopamine, like repeat mode, like again, again, again, again. So yeah, I don't, I'm not crazy. I'm not obsessed with food. If I feel like chowing down on something that's, you know, that is not great. You know, since I started making milk, I used to eat more ice cream. I would, I would make mint chocolate chip milkshakes, like take a scoop of ice cream, put it in a glass and put milk in there and stir it up. Now I just have mint chocolate chip milk, which is delicious and it tastes to me like dessert. So I've covered a lot of those bases.

• 1:54:36Speaker 01

  And you've also trained a lot, though.

• 1:54:38Jocko Willink?

  I train a lot. Yes. And that's true. Like if you go surfing and you did jujitsu and you lifted in a day, like bring a pizza on, cause you need it, you know, you need to have some of that energy, some of that food, some of that fuel. So yeah, I'm not, I'm not crazy. I'm not obsessed with food, but I also am not stupid. And I also recognize, I also recognize, I always tell people like, remember what it feels like when you get done working out. It feels good. Like there's, there's very few situations, one percent of the time, do you get done working out and you feel worse? Very seldom does that happen. It's the same thing with food. Very seldom do you eat eight freaking donuts, like Echo Charles?

• 1:55:18Jocko Willink?

  And, and you don't feel like, dude, I don't feel as good. Very seldom does the, does the good feeling outlast the last swallow of the, of the, uh, the infraction. The infraction. So I know that and you know, but I'm not, I'm not obsessed with it. And I work out a lot. It's one thing as this kind of a lot of this new medicine has come out. You mentioned it. You were like, you were like, I hate to say this, but working out is more important than diet. And as that has become, because in like the world of bodybuilding, it's actually flipped, right?

• 1:55:56Speaker 01

  Right, but that's not exactly, and it's also not physiologically natural. I mean, there's only so much muscle somebody could put on from a physiologically natural perspective. But yes, it is.

• 1:56:08Jocko Willink?

  But it's flipped in the bodybuilding world because you need to, because you're trying to get shredded.

• 1:56:15Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:56:15Jocko Willink?

  And the shred, the aesthetic shred is more based on your diet than it is based on your working out. Of course, you need to do cardio and lift and if you, if you do those things correctly, you can eat a little bit worse, but for the most part, if you're going to be a bodybuilder, it's more about diet than it is about lifting. I guess for a true bodybuilder, it's also more about the steroids that you're taking to get that jacked. But so it's like steroids, diet and steroids, diet and then lifting.

• 1:56:48Speaker 01

  Lifting.

• 1:56:49Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And, and you know, not to discredit that you, if the guys that do steroids, you also have to lift super heavy. You can't just do steroids and then expect to be Ronnie Coleman, right?

• 1:57:00Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:57:00Jocko Willink?

  Ronnie Coleman freaking lifted heavy as hell.

• 1:57:04Speaker 01

  And they're very, they're very disciplined and deeply focused. You know, you mentioned something about very rarely do you train and then feel worse. It's again, it goes back to this, people will always talk about endorphins. Okay, we know this. But when you train skeletal muscle releases these myokines, it also affects something called BDNF in the brain, brain derived neurotropic factor. It helps with neurogenesis and it helps with memory cognition and there are components to training that help with mood.

• 1:57:36Jocko Willink?

  I wrote about this in a book called Discipline Equals Freedom Field Manual. I wrote about all those things because it's not just bro science. 99.9% of the time, when you get done working out, you feel better than when you, than if you didn't work out. So, speaking of exercising, like I said, there's you, the whole, you cover meal plans, you've got recipes in there.

• 1:57:58Speaker 01

  Listen, why, why did I do this? I did that because we have to eliminate excuses. Why is it that 70% of Americans are either overweight or obese? So why? And then, why is it that the majority of people don't work out? I had to create something that if you believed that we can be as humans, strong, capable and resilient and have capacity, I needed to take out any excuse. And that's why I put all that stuff in there.

• 1:58:26Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. So get that, get the book, get those details. But then we're going to go into the next part, which we were just kind of starting to bump into anyways, which is training, which is exercise. And you say this, "Exercise is your body's birthright. We humans were designed for physical movement and our bodies are capable of extraordinary feats. Don't think of training as an activity with health benefits. Instead, consider it as a baseline requirement for wellness and an essential component of maintaining health and protecting longevity."

• 1:58:58Jocko Willink?

  Exercise is traditionally divided into, and I'm fast forwarding, there's more details. Exercise is traditionally divided into either endurance, cardio, or strength, weights. This is fine, this is a fine starting point for understanding the different ends of the spectrum, but the interplay of different activity types is more complex and many common beliefs around effective training haven't kept pace with research advancements. And then you go into talk about resistance, exercise, training, endurance training, and then high intensity interval training, HIIT, which surprisingly, it's been around for a long time.

• 1:59:33Speaker 01

  For a long time.

• 1:59:34Jocko Willink?

  But people really have more recently understood the effectiveness of it. HIIT is the, and this is going from the book, is internal interval training, exercise that calls for short bursts of activity, followed by short periods of lower intensity movements. So, this is what we're talking about. You got a lift. You gotta do some kind of endurance and you should probably combine those two together to do some kind of high intensity interval training.

• 2:00:04Speaker 01

  Yes, and I'll say that people will talk about this zone two cardio, zone two cardio is having its moment right now. The longer endurance, yes, it's great for VO2 max, etc. We've talked about that ad nauseam, but I would say from a practical aspect that you can improve your VO2 max, you can improve your health status by doing high intensity exercise. So the less time you're training, the more you have to get after it. It's not about being like the cardio bunny or well, I weight lifted for 45 minutes. If you do not have time, you should up the intensity.

• 2:00:42Jocko Willink?

  Yep, 100%. I, that's, that's one of those things that you have levers. And what's cool is for me personally, there's days where some high intensity workout, like I'm feeling worn down, I'm feeling like you know what I'm gonna do? Something that's longer endurance. There's also times where I'm don't, either don't have time or sometimes you don't, I don't feel like going for an hour long run. Guess what I feel like doing? Jacking some steel, doing some deadlifts, whatever the case may be. So having all of these in your, in your repertoire is very important and, and then making sure that you don't focus on the one that you like the most, right?

• 2:01:27Jocko Willink?

  Cause it's real easy to be like, well, you know, I like to be jacked. And Echo's over here on his ninth set of bicep curls. But even Echo has opened up his mind now in the past 10 years where he trains, he does metcons with high intensity, you know, interval training, still lifts heavy. What is your, do you ever do like long, slow cardio type thing?

• 2:01:55Speaker 02

  Eating nowadays I'm not, but.

• 2:01:57Speaker 01

  Only when he eats donuts.

• 2:01:59Jocko Willink?

  Other than, because the jujitsu falls in that category. Jujitsu is beautiful. Jujitsu really does help you with. It's, it's a little bit of hit, but it's also endurance. Like you go and roll for an hour, which is pretty common to go and train for an hour, five minute rounds, but during the rounds, you're not going a hundred percent for five minutes. You can't do that. You can go, but sometimes you gotta go really hard for 32 seconds. And then you get in a position, you can kind of settle down, you get a little bit of, then you go going again. So jujitsu is a beautiful thing.

• 2:02:28Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. I, yeah, I do. Yes. Like go for runs for like, yeah, like 30, 45 minutes or something like that. But no, not as, not as often.

• 2:02:35Speaker 01

  And I, I think that, you know, Jocko, what you said in the beginning is you don't stop. You continue to do it. And that's, again, what is the ultimate outcome that we want is we don't want to get injured so that people can continue to train. And then using movements that you would use in real life that are more functional, that maybe have rotation, whether it's swinging a kettlebell or, you know, doing a chop or, you know, carrying heavy weight.

• 2:03:02Jocko Willink?

  Unbalanced weight.

• 2:03:03Speaker 01

  Exactly. Unbalanced weight, doing things that potentially translate, because we're not training to get better at exercise. We're training to get better at life and to be more capable at life. What are the actions that we can take that will move us closer to, to do that? Whether it's jujitsu, throwing around kettlebells or unbalanced kettlebell weights or putting something overhead. Those kinds of movements, we have to continue to do. Because it's not, I hate to say this, it's not an if, but it's a when. We train for life because there is typically a time, something will happen. Whether you have the flu for a week or you, I don't know, get injured, something happens.

• 2:03:47Speaker 01

  You have to plan for those times. And I know that that's morbid, but the more you can build up your body and be able to have movements and motions that will translate to real life, that is your best defense.

• 2:04:02Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And it's real easy. And this is a huge ongoing conversation that I've heard, had with Burt Soren. You know who Burt Soren is from Soren X anyways?

• 2:04:14Jocko Willink?

  He was like a thrower in college. He's a stud, but I was talking to him about just movements and how, how if you. There's movements where, let's say for whatever reason, like I, I hurt my arm very bad doing jujitsu. I couldn't straighten my arm and I couldn't do overhead squats for nine months. And when I finally went back to do overhead squats, I could straighten my arm. I'm like, okay. I could barely do one. And so I was like right back with the PVC pipe, meaning no weight. And it would have been real easy to be like, well, you know, I'm getting old. And in, and, and that's pretty much your ego talking of like, well, you know, I used to be able to do that, but it's,

• 2:04:59Jocko Willink?

  I don't need to do that anymore. I don't have anything to prove and, or your ego saying like, oh, if I can't do it, then I'm just going to pretend that it doesn't exist type thing. Or you say, you know what? I'm not going to submit this movement. I'm not going to give up this movement. I'm going to get it back. And that's what you do. You start with the PVC pipe, then you go with the bar, then you put the, the tens on. Then the 25s, then the, then the 35s, then you got the 45s. You're, you're kind of back in the game. And you can definitely rebuild what you've lost. So again, if you're in a situation in life where you stopped working out for whatever reason, and you used to build the put, bench three wheels and now you can barely do a freaking push up.

• 2:05:41Jocko Willink?

  Well, guess what? You can get it back. You, you might not be able to get it all back, whatever. You know what you should do? Try and get it back. And it's the same thing with your squats. It's the same thing with any movement that you could do, you can likely get back to something close to that. And if you can't get close, get as close as you can.

• 2:06:00Speaker 01

  And you know what I'm hearing? I'm hearing you say, set standards instead of goals. Set standards for how you're going to operate instead of goals.

• 2:06:11Jocko Willink?

  I like that and I do that. So I have some kind of like workouts that I do. Where, whether it's pull-ups, whether it's dips, whether it's squats, where like, let's say pull-ups, I'm going to do 300 pull-ups in this workout. And that's just kind of what we're doing. And it may be, oh, I haven't, I've been sick. I've hurt my shoulder and I haven't been able to do as many pull-ups as, but you gotta go, I'm going to do 300 pull-ups and it's going to take me however long it's going to take me. It's going to take a half an hour. Maybe it's going to take 40 minutes. Maybe it's going to take me an hour. But I'm gonna do them and then you've got to hold that standard. So yeah, I believe you can have standards or you should have standards of what you're going to be able to do. And then if you if

• 2:06:55Jocko Willink?

  you fall below the standard, you've got to work to get it back. Cause I think a lot of people fall below the standard and instead of work to get it back, they just set a new standard a little bit lower. Not, not, not ideal. So you've got to be careful of that. Um, again, in the book, you've got all kinds of, you, you go through like various workouts that you can do. You've got beginner level workouts, you've got intermediate level workouts, you've got a bunch of really good information that people can use to kind of get their workouts going.

• 2:07:25Speaker 01

  And I think for the very fitness savvy people, what this does is it puts science behind the bro science. And that becomes important if we're trying to reach and change the world from this obesity centric view to more of a muscle centric view is we have to have science behind the reasons and behind the protocols. And so again, let's say someone is advanced at training and they're like, I don't need a training program. The information there is meaningful because it will allow an individual to talk about the science of muscle health and why it's so much more.

• 2:08:01Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And also give them maybe a little bit of direction or a little bit of better understanding. I've been very happily surprised over the past, I guess, how long have we been doing this podcast for? Eight years, something like this?

• 2:08:13Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 2:08:14Jocko Willink?

  So I've been very pleasantly surprised when my personal experiences align with Echo's bro science and align with legitimate, you know, whether it's Huberman, whether it's Jordan Peterson, whether it's you or Kirk Parsley or Peter Attia and the things that I've been doing where I'm like, oh, that's why that was effective. Occasionally it's like, oh, maybe I was a little too focused on it, but, but most of the time it's been, oh yeah. Okay. Here's a stupid example. Huberman's like, oh, you should, when you go outside in the morning, you, you shouldn't wear sunglasses because they block UV light. Well, for, for me, when I run, I sweat and so I don't like to wear

• 2:08:57Jocko Willink?

  glasses in the morning and I run in the morning. So I don't like to wear glasses because it gets sweat on the glasses. So I just don't wear them. So it's just luck. But now I actually go, oh, that's actually a good thing. Um, so, so these little things that line up. You have better understanding and you can then focus on them. So it's the same thing that you're saying with this book. You can read through these things and start to understand maybe some of the methodology and the science behind the bro science.

• 2:09:22Speaker 01

  And where you're at, right? If you want to order your own blood labs, where the, you know, you have to have metrics. So you have an understanding of where you are to ultimately identify where you're going to be. If you continue, let's say you're not training hard enough. Let's say you're not eating right for your body. It's going to show up. And if you look at it, then you can circumvent a downstream effect early on. And that's the, that's the real goal is how do we allow people to live to their full capacity? And it's not just about doing things. It's about doing the right things at the right time for the right outcome.

• 2:10:01Jocko Willink?

  Fast forward a little bit in the book, you've got a section here about mindset and you've got the five fundamental attributes for mindset here. The first one that you talk about is courage. Why, why is courage number one?

• 2:10:13Speaker 01

  Well, can I tell you, so you know, books typically take time to write. And I actually have an even better mindset component.

• 2:10:23Jocko Willink?

  Oh.

• 2:10:23Speaker 01

  That I would love to share.

• 2:10:25Jocko Willink?

  Let's go.

• 2:10:25Speaker 01

  That, okay. I've, and you and I were talking about this prior, is that a portion of the practice is all operators. And there are certain themes that I have seen. And I'd love to tell you a story. So I had one patient had come to me, he had been in, he'd been in the teams, he's a breacher, been in the teams for 20 years, never been injured, was home from a deployment on his motorcycle going five miles an hour. A 17 year old girl taxiing and driving took him out and he lost his leg. He had come to my clinic and, you know, I was like, hey, man, are you okay? Oh, you know, yeah, I'm tired. You know, normal

• 2:11:06Speaker 01

  response, totally. No big deal, right? This was months after, maybe this was six or eight months after. And I was like, no, dude, how are you really doing? You know, I'm 5'1", I'm married to a team guy. I take care of a lot of team guys. He's going to tell me. He looked at me like I asked him, where was the box of tampons? And he was like, oh, he's like, you mean my leg? He's like, doc, that was like six months ago. Like, what are you talking about? And I was like, oh my gosh, this guy actually was totally neutral about the impact that whatever this thing had happened in here in my mind, I'm telling this whole story about

• 2:11:48Speaker 01

  he's never going back to teens, he's never going to be deployed, he's gonna have to do X, Y, and Z. And he was very neutral. And I called my husband, I was like, oh, hey, you know, so and so was in the clinic and, and it was like dead silence. And they were lying. And he was like, honey, yeah, what are you talking about? That was like eight months ago. And it was at that moment. So yes, I talk about courage and I talk about these attributes, but I would say the most important component, again, it's trends over time of who you see, was that there is a level of neutrality that those individuals that exceeded the highest level have. It, there isn't a story, they don't never get too high, and then they never get too low.

• 2:12:31Speaker 01

  It is kind of controlled neutrality. And that, that has, I have seen that over and over and over again. And that's actually what struck me.

• 2:12:43Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I mean, I just call it balance. I wrote a book called The Dichotomy of Leadership and like the key, the key component of a good leader is that they're balanced. And like you just said, when I win, I'm not jumping for joy. When I lose, I'm not throwing my fists into the wall. I'm gonna be neutral, I'm gonna be balanced. When good things happen, I'm not gonna let them go to my head. When bad things happen, I'm not gonna let them tear me apart. When, I'm not gonna get overly emotional, but I'm not gonna be too detached. So it's just being balanced absolutely is a key component. And also, you know, flying off, you know, I, I don't know if you've seen this, but I would imagine that if you have someone that's gonna focus on their health, and so they become totally obsessed, and they go very extreme, that's probably not gonna last as long than if they go, okay, I'm gonna start doing the right things, I'm not gonna go crazy.

• 2:13:27Jocko Willink?

  Like even when you're just asking me, like, do I eat chocolate chip cookies? It's like, yeah, I do. I like chocolate chip cookies. Do I like, whatever, these, you know, mint chocolate chip milkshake or tiramisu? Yeah. It's like, I'm not going crazy. So I think there's, does it apply there too with people trying to like change their lives without going to the extreme where it's unsustainable?

• 2:13:51Speaker 01

  Does it apply? Yes. And I would say that the higher a person goes, the lower they go. It's not this baseline. So let me give you an example. I take care of a lot of entrepreneurs. And right before a big event, let's say they put on a huge event in Vegas and they are so amped up and they are just on a high, I can predict that as high as they go, on the flip side is as low as they're going to go. And at that peak and at that trough, those are points of high vulnerability. Those are the points where they're going to go off their training program. Those are the points, the points, maybe they're going to drink more, maybe they're going to buy another car, maybe

• 2:14:32Speaker 01

  they're gonna cheat on their wife, like whatever, the extremes at that peak in that trough, that is when they are most vulnerable. How does that translate to health? Nothing will take a high performer out as fast as those highs and lows. And it's actually, people will say, oh, the highs are great. No, because there is this, almost this dopamine drive that it becomes depleted. And you don't go to a, if one of these many knives was a baseline, you don't go to a baseline, you mirror as high as you're going to go is as low as you go. And if you mitigate that,

• 2:15:10Speaker 01

  then you can prevent these predictable downstream effects of human nature. Humans are interesting. They're so shocked by their own human nature. They, they cannot believe the, you show me a person, you show me their habits, I will tell you how successful they are. Because there are just patterns and they are shocked each time by their own humanness.

• 2:15:39Jocko Willink?

  I got to see, clearly you get to see that in the teams because you get guys going on deployment, the deployment is like one kind of high because you're very gratified with what you're doing. And then you come home and maybe now you've got like problems because you know, you had this girlfriend and she took all your money and your dog and like, so you go this up and down thing. But it was a really condensed version of that was fighters in the MMA world. Like grueling camp for eight weeks, you know, getting beat up and then.

• 2:16:10Jocko Willink?

  The final weight cut, very draining, very low, and then they go out, fight, they win. It's like, man, I've been to those parties. Like, those dudes are freaking going crazy. They're making so many bad decisions that night and or they lose. And now it's, guess what they're doing? Same thing. Bunch of bad decisions, just terrible. Whether it's the higher or the low, the freaking performance or the the activities following a big win or a big loss are almost the same, which is kind of crazy. The pros, and these guys, actually, I'm talking about professional fighters, but the really successful guys,

• 2:16:49Jocko Willink?

  they win, it's like, cool, I won, they're, they're, yeah, they're, they're happy, but they're gonna continue to train. They're not like, you know, you can, when the guy says, I'm gonna be back in the gym on Monday. When the guy says that, that's a really important thing. When a guy says, oh, I just need some downtime and I'm gonna, you, I, I love when I hear a fighter say, I'll be back in the gym on Monday. Win or lose, I'll be back in the gym on Monday. What a good statement to make. But when you say, well, you know, it was a really tough camp and I'm just looking to, no, I'm, I'm gonna warn against that. Be careful of it.

• 2:17:25Speaker 01

  The pros do exactly what you said. The people at the top have a level of neutrality where the big accomplishments don't affect them and the big losses also don't affect them. The, the neutrality is really, I don't want to say superpower, that sounds pretty stupid, but it is a level of capacity that rookies don't have. And I see that with newer entrepreneurs or individuals like that. And those that cultivate that capacity of neutrality, they're exceptional.

• 2:18:05Jocko Willink?

  Stay balanced, everybody. You got courage. But so before you added balance and neutrality into this, you had courage, perseverance, obviously got to stick with things, self-discipline, clearly, big supporter of that over here. Adaptability, that's a good one to remember because things aren't going to go as planned. You're not going to have that food prep that you did and you left it at home and now what are you going to do? Or you going on traveling and you talk a lot about traveling in here because you travel, but you know, oh, the gym didn't have what I want to work out, so I'm just not going to do anything. You got to be adaptable and then resilience. These are kind of the key components that you talk about.

• 2:18:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, and courage, this is going to be surprising, but there is a level of courageousness that is required to feel worthy of excellence.

• 2:18:53Jocko Willink?

  Expand on that.

• 2:18:54Speaker 01

  Believe it or not, when an individual doesn't seem to be reaching their full potential, let's say I'm seeing a guy or a girl and I'm just, they're not getting it together. Often times it comes down to they don't feel worthy of having the health or the body or the discipline or the thing that comes with that execution, which is surprising. But worthiness, feeling worthy of actually being that person trips people up.

• 2:19:29Jocko Willink?

  What does that look like? Like, give me a little bit of an example.

• 2:19:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, let's say there's a really successful guy that is, you know, he's very successful at his business. He has all this outward discipline. The business is a multimillion dollar business. He's running teams. He's doing great and he is a slob.

• 2:19:48Jocko Willink?

  Mean physically?

• 2:19:49Speaker 01

  Physically. He is able to execute on the external business and have external discipline, but there is no internal discipline because that internal discipline would require a bit of courage for him to identify with something else, become a different type of person, feel worthy of the success that he's having. And that may seem silly, like if a team guy is listening, they may be like, ah, come on, get after, rip off my shirt, whatever. But for many people.

• 2:20:22Speaker 01

  An unexamined mind will lead to components of sabotage and they will only ever go as high as they feel worthy. An individual will feel worthy in business and not feel self worthy of the success that they have obtained. The only way through that is oftentimes a courageous step. It does require courage to cultivate a way of familiarity. So the less than version of themselves becomes familiar. And when we understand familiarity, that becomes the

• 2:21:00Speaker 01

  normal, even though it's not meaningful, it's just normal. And courage is required to question that behavior, that component of health and wellness.

• 2:21:16Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you just get comfortable with this normal state that you're in and it takes some courage to say, I'm not going to live like that anymore.

• 2:21:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. And it, the lack of discipline becomes familiar and an individual will be surprised by that and will often fall back on the zone of comfort. And it's not that they feel comfortable being a slob. It's that that is what they know to be the normal.

• 2:21:45Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Can't let that happen. I'm gonna close out the book. Just look again. I just read some highlights of the book and I'll close out with this one little section that you've got here. It says, "Choose your hard. Far too often and usually without much thought, people default into taking the easiest path. Choosing to do things the least difficult way is what we are programmed to do. It's part of who we are or maybe who we have become. Unfortunately, doing what's convenient right now is no lasting strategy. It merely makes things more difficult later on in virtually all cases. Instead of always looking for the path of least resistance, try choosing to do the hard things in life. That's what makes us strong."

• 2:22:31Jocko Willink?

  So, like I said, there's, I mean, the book is several hundred pages long, almost 400 pages long. So, there's tons of information in the book for people to refer to, to go back to, to compare what they've been doing, where they've been doing things right, maybe where they've been doing things wrong. So, Forever Strong. That's what we're doing. What else you got going on besides the book?

• 2:23:03Speaker 01

  I actually have a podcast.

• 2:23:04Jocko Willink?

  Okay, what's the podcast called?

• 2:23:06Speaker 01

  The Dr. Gabrielle Lyon Show. Shocking. Easy to find, very easy to find. We also have a membership. People can find out about that on the website. It is, if people have questions, they can join. We have an expert on every week, pretty cool, to clear up some of these questions, whether it's hormone questions, etc. I do have a practice, and I have a concierge medical practice. People can find out more information, myself, there are other providers. And two really important, and obviously you can find me on Twitter, or Facebook, or X, etc., or YouTube.

• 2:23:41Jocko Willink?

  And all those things, very conveniently, are all at Dr. Gabrielle, Dr. Gabrielle, I almost messed that up, Dr. Gabrielle Lyon dot com, Dr. Gabrielle Lyon on YouTube, Dr. Gabrielle Lyon on Instagram, Facebook, you're there, which is called X now, by the way.

• 2:24:00Speaker 01

  Yes. I wanted to mention, may I mention two other things that I think are really important. We didn't get a chance to talk about this, but I'm hoping at some point in the future we will. There is a foundation called Hunter Seven, foundation that does early detection for veterans and military operators and those in the military, which has done a really great job at early cancer detection. It's called Hunter Seven Foundation. I strongly recommend people, check it out, it's really important. The other thing that I would like to mention is SEAL Future Foundation. For those individuals listening, for those operators and their family listening, I sit on the Board of Health for SEAL Future Foundation.

• 2:24:44Speaker 01

  We see a lot of the guys coming out and their families, their wives, their family members. So, I think that that's also something very important to mention.

• 2:24:54Jocko Willink?

  No, those are awesome organizations. I hadn't, I didn't know about, I knew about the SEAL Future Foundation, obviously. I didn't know about Hunter 7 until you told me about it. That's just awesome. So many of these diseases, cancers, if you catch them early,

• 2:25:11Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:25:11Jocko Willink?

  they're no factor. If you catch them late, they kill you. Like, it's insane. And so, to give people what Hunter 7 does, and again, you explained this to me before you hit record, giving these former special operations guys this screening to catch these things early and save their lives. And you, you know, you were telling me that there's a big percentage of them that they get caught, just like with any part of the populace. If you don't get screened and you don't get looked at, these cancers just grow inside your body, and guess, guess when you notice them? When you freaking have major issues, and by then, oftentimes, it's too late. So, that's an awesome organization, and then, yeah, the SEAL Future Foundation, another great organization that helps

• 2:25:55Jocko Willink?

  take care of SEALs. And, you know, the job of being a SEAL, whether there's a war going on or not, is really hard on your body.

• 2:26:05Speaker 01

  It's really hard.

• 2:26:06Jocko Willink?

  You're shooting Carl Gustaf rockets. You're sitting there doing explosive breaching. You're getting beat up in boats. You're jumping out of airplanes, landing hard. You're firing machine guns. You're firing 50 caliber machine guns. Everything that you're doing, you're around all those chemicals that all those things produce, explosives. You're lacking sleep. Like, there's everything, just about everything that you can do is bad for you. Like, the job itself is bad for you. Look, you work out to try and stay in shape for the job, but the job itself's not good for you. So, to have these guys live through that for 20 years, 25 years, 30 years, by the time they get done with that,

• 2:26:48Jocko Willink?

  they, they're probably gonna need some help medically. So, these are awesome. Awesome organizations that help out with that. And it's awesome that someone like you with your knowledges on the board and connected with those things and getting people out there because obviously um I am a big supporter of that community and that these organizations that are helping that community is awesome. And clearly you're a supporter of that community as well since you uh made the fatal error of meeting a teen guy one night and that that's what happened.

• 2:27:18Speaker 01

  I actually told him that there was zero chance and I did not pick up the phone for like two months. Just that it just would not stop.

• 2:27:28Jocko Willink?

  But you know what? He had courage. He had resilience. He had balance like he was he had the met the mindset to make it happen. That's goes a long way. Uh so is that get us up to speed? We're good. We got Dr. Gabrielle Lyon dot com. And then you got Twitter, YouTube.

• 2:27:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:27:45Jocko Willink?

  Um you got your podcast same title. So good universal titling. I like it. Is that good to speed?

• 2:27:52Speaker 01

  It does. Yes, sir.

• 2:27:53Jocko Willink?

  Echo Charles, what do you got for questions?

• 2:27:55Speaker 02

  Uh do you remember what year you were in Hawaii?

• 2:27:59Speaker 01

  No, I don't.

• 2:28:01Speaker 02

  What about roughly? Was it before 2001?

• 2:28:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Kauai. I was on Kauai.

• 2:28:07Speaker 02

  Kauai, my hood.

• 2:28:08Speaker 01

  Really? Are you from Kauai?

• 2:28:09Speaker 02

  From Kauai.

• 2:28:10Speaker 01

  Are you serious?

• 2:28:11Speaker 02

  But at that time I because I went to UH, University of Hawaii.

• 2:28:14Speaker 01

  Are you serious?

• 2:28:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I was probably there.

• 2:28:16Speaker 01

  That's my favorite place in the world. So we lived in um Princeville.

• 2:28:20Speaker 02

  Oh, right on.

• 2:28:20Speaker 01

  And then and then we um Princeville and then we were near Honolulu.

• 2:28:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. No, sure. Hell, yeah. It's good.

• 2:28:28Speaker 01

  I love Kauai.

• 2:28:29Speaker 02

  I grew up on the south side.

• 2:28:30Speaker 01

  Okay. And is that uh Poipu?

• 2:28:33Speaker 02

  Poipu. Yeah. Hell, yeah. Okay. Okay. Right on. Uh yeah, so from 95 to 99, I was on Oahu though.

• 2:28:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:28:41Speaker 02

  At school. That's cool.

• 2:28:42Speaker 01

  That's amazing.

• 2:28:43Speaker 02

  Right on. Princeville is super nice, though. Were you with like a a rich family?

• 2:28:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean.

• 2:28:47Speaker 02

  That's Princeville right there.

• 2:28:48Speaker 01

  They were but it wasn't that rich at the time. Now it's just like crazy.

• 2:28:53Speaker 02

  Um also, so, okay, so if I go to the doctor hypothetically and they say, hey, all your nine, you know, I get my blood work done. They say, hey, all your numbers are great, you know? Except your cholesterol is kinda high.

• 2:29:05Speaker 01

  So is this for the podcast? Or is this not for the podcast?

• 2:29:07Speaker 02

  No, no, no, this is the deal.

• 2:29:09Speaker 01

  Oh, okay, cuz I was like, I'll take care of that. I got that. I can do that for you.

• 2:29:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, see.

• 2:29:12Speaker 01

  We should do a, um, I'm happy to do that. We can do a, um, a full cardiac screening, like a legitimate, not just cholesterol.

• 2:29:21Speaker 02

  Okay, so, cuz, okay, so I used to drink a lot. And I was like, hey, like, I'm getting older now, so, and this was like, probably like a decade of solid drinking.

• 2:29:30Speaker 01

  That's impressive.

• 2:29:31Speaker 02

  This could be problematic, kind of thing. I wasn't feeling nothing, except for every once in a while, I'd feel like, kinda like, dismal, just in general, you know, we'll say. So I was like, all right, let me get my blood, I don't need my liver just conking out one day, you know, so let's get some blood work done, see, see all the things, so. Um, but I would still work out, still do all that stuff, right? Even sometimes twice a day, this whole thing. So I went, got the blood work done, and everything looked good, everything. After just a decade of solid drinking, like all this stuff. So I'm like, frick, it's probably cuz I'm still working out hard, but they did say my cholesterol's high. Now, another guy that I know, who's kind of this athletic type or whatever, he was like, bro, don't worry about that, because that could mean other stuff, you know? There's like more to it than that. Is that true?

• 2:30:16Speaker 01

  I would agree with that. We wouldn't just look at cholesterol, we'd look at something called an ApoB. We'd look at insulin resistance, we'd look at a, a lipid particle panel, there's other things. I would not typically just treat off of total cholesterol. That's, um, a little bit archaic, I think.

• 2:30:36Speaker 02

  And obviously, you know, with my bachelor's, well, it's more of an associate's in bro's science, I was like, hey. You got a doctor, bro, in bro's science. I was like, hey, so he was like, hey, I'm gonna prescribe you some medication. But I was like, you know, no, I'm not gonna take the med, and I didn't take the medication, never did. And then, um, that's when I talked to my other friend, and he was like, no, there's more to it than that, don't worry. Different, bro. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:30:58Speaker 01

  I mean.

• 2:30:59Speaker 02

  We put our heads together.

• 2:31:00Speaker 01

  That's funny. You know, it depends if it's hypercholester- a familial, hypercholesterolemia.

• 2:31:06Speaker 01

  We would really have to look at the full picture and then the next level of that would be doing something called a GB insight. And what that is, is that would be a genetic profile of the kind of medication or where. So let me, let me take a step back. It will show us where the defect is. Are you absorbing too much of the lipids? Are you not excreting them, et cetera? So it would show us exactly where the challenge is as to why your levels would be high. And then it allows to pinpoint treatment. What kind of medication would an individual use? What is the, the target? So that's what I would do. And then finally, really getting imaging. So it's not just blood.

• 2:31:50Speaker 01

  You have to see something called, what we use is a clearly scan. So it shows hard and soft plaque.

• 2:31:56Speaker 02

  Oh damn. Is that like a DEXA scan? Is that different?

• 2:31:59Speaker 01

  Not quite. It's a CT scan and they put dye in you and you, it'll look at, it's a whole thing. It's a whole situation. But I will tell you, I trial all of this stuff out on my husband.

• 2:32:12Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 2:32:13Speaker 01

  So it's all good. And as long as I prepped you before, but it's, that is very valuable because you have to address a challenge despite where the standards of care are. If there is an inclination that this has to be addressed, we should look at it from a comprehensive view because a more progressive physician will be able to identify the pillars. For example, whether it's a genetic test, whether it's an APOB, whether it is insulin resistance, et cetera, and then take an action.

• 2:32:47Speaker 02

  That makes sense.

• 2:32:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:32:49Speaker 02

  Kind of confirmed my, my deal as always. Uh, last question. So let's say grapes, right? Grapes, the fruits. Can we overeat grapes?

• 2:32:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, you can overeat anything. Grapes, again, could they be healthy totally? They do have more fructose. You're not going to overeat fructose on just grapes, but.

• 2:33:08Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, okay, so, because we're talking about overeating.

• 2:33:11Speaker 01

  There is, it's a, it's a, it's a little bit of a, it's a little bit of a Pandora's box, but I think grapes are great. They do have sugars. If you really wanted to get crazy with it, you could throw a glucose monitor on yourself, eat a whole bunch of grapes, see how high your blood sugar goes, and then see how you feel.

• 2:33:32Speaker 02

  I have these grapes, right? So last night I ate two steaks, some rice, and then we had some grapes. You know, with the kids are fun and there are some really good grapes. You know, some grapes are a lot more sweet than others. You know, these are the way on this side of the spectrum of sweetness. And I felt like I overate the grapes because I was already full, but I was like, but I can't stop eating these grapes. See what I'm saying? Like, is that a thing? Because it's not like blueberries, for example. Blueberries taste super good, but after a while you're like, but I'm kind of done with these blueberries after a little bit. But the grapes weren't like that. See what I'm saying? I felt like they were overriding my.

• 2:34:01Jocko Willink?

  Like, did you eat the whole, the whole thing?

• 2:34:03Speaker 02

  No, no, no.

• 2:34:04Jocko Willink?

  The whole stalk?

• 2:34:05Speaker 02

  I could have, I would have probably if I didn't like catch myself.

• 2:34:08Speaker 01

  No, I think it's, I, I think that with your amount of activity, it would be very difficult to really overconsume. I have less worry about that.

• 2:34:18Speaker 02

  Is it a red flag, though, that I was like super full from all the steak and rice and stuff? And then I was still like, I can't stop eating it. Isn't that like a small red flag in and of itself?

• 2:34:27Speaker 01

  No, because the truth is you could have stopped eating it. You didn't want to.

• 2:34:32Speaker 02

  Yes, yeah. I just felt like it was like an addiction being carried out right there in front of my eyes. You know, so psychologically.

• 2:34:39Jocko Willink?

  You would have kept going. That's what she's saying.

• 2:34:41Speaker 02

  Like.

• 2:34:41Jocko Willink?

  You caught yourself?

• 2:34:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, but I'm a very strong and disciplined person as far as addiction go for the most part. But I'm just saying, let's say I'm a little kid or something like this, you know? And I'm like, are these, are these grapes genetically engineered? You know, you know how they put extra stuff in it to make them taste sweet or whatever?

• 2:34:57Speaker 01

  They have definitely changed fruits over time to make them more sweet and more palatable. Yes. If you, have you ever had the, have you ever had grapes that are just like heirloom?

• 2:35:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, like wild caught grapes or whatever.

• 2:35:14Speaker 01

  Anything, anything wild that has never been engineered at all is just awful.

• 2:35:20Jocko Willink?

  Have you ever had the cotton candy grapes?

• 2:35:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:35:22Jocko Willink?

  Have you had those? Have you had those? Those are crazy.

• 2:35:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's one, that's part of why I'm saying it because grapes are one of those ones. There's these, I think they call them black grapes. They're super dark purple, probably the same way. You can't stop eating them because they're so sweet. It's like, I don't know, there's something going on is what I feel. But if you're, if, you know, if you're telling me, hey, these are fruits. So just like celery or blueberries or whatever, eat as many as you need.

• 2:35:45Speaker 01

  No, it's not that. But here's what I would say, prove it to yourself.

• 2:35:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:35:48Speaker 01

  Throw a glucose monitor on, see actually what happens. And then once you do that, you'll know exactly. And you either never do it again or you'll keep doing it.

• 2:35:58Speaker 02

  Carry on.

• 2:35:58Speaker 01

  Carry on.

• 2:35:59Speaker 02

  So get to the bottom of it then, basically. Okay.

• 2:36:02Speaker 01

  Yes, sir.

• 2:36:02Jocko Willink?

  Addiction.

• 2:36:03Speaker 02

  Right on.

• 2:36:04Jocko Willink?

  There we go. You got any more questions?

• 2:36:06Speaker 02

  I have many more, but we're gonna leave it at that for now, maybe next time, yeah.

• 2:36:09Jocko Willink?

  All right, well. Any closing comments from you?

• 2:36:13Speaker 01

  No, I just want to thank you for everything that you do, that you guys both do for the community.

• 2:36:19Jocko Willink?

  Well, I appreciate it. Now, it's, I'm glad you could make it down here. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for sharing this information. Thanks for putting that book together. Thanks for doing what you do to help normal people get on the path, stay on the path. And clearly, thanks for what you do for the SEAL community with Hunter Seven, with the SEAL Future Foundation. It's awesome. And, and thanks for continuing to work with people to help them get healthier in all aspects of their lives. And of course, stay forever strong. Appreciate it. Thank you.

• 2:36:55Speaker 01

  Thanks.

• 2:36:57Jocko Willink?

  And with that, Gabrielle has left the building.

• 2:37:02Jocko Willink?

  Trying to stay strong out there.

• 2:37:04Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:37:04Jocko Willink?

  Very.

• 2:37:04Speaker 02

  Yes, we are.

• 2:37:05Jocko Willink?

  Look, do we have confirmation bias?

• 2:37:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:37:07Jocko Willink?

  We might.

• 2:37:08Speaker 02

  Bruh.

• 2:37:09Jocko Willink?

  But.

• 2:37:09Speaker 02

  Big time.

• 2:37:10Jocko Willink?

  But we also have some science, some bro-science. We're trying to get stronger. We're trying to be stronger. We want to have muscle. We want to eat protein. We want to work out. That's what we're doing. So confirmation bias, perhaps.

• 2:37:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:37:26Jocko Willink?

  But let's face it, kinda true.

• 2:37:30Speaker 02

  Hey, when you're an actual, uh, trained, experienced, professional.

• 2:37:36Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 2:37:37Speaker 02

  Saying it, I don't think that that's necessarily bias.

• 2:37:42Jocko Willink?

  Well, let's face it, you and I have a bias.

• 2:37:45Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:37:46Jocko Willink?

  That supports everything that she just said.

• 2:37:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:37:48Jocko Willink?

  Right? That being said, she, you know, she's seen thousands of patients, right? She's gone through the schooling. She's experienced it herself. So confirmation bias, yes. But even if you remove that, you gotta listen up. Hey, listen, if you just think, hey, Echo and Jocko are just meatheads, they're just working out protein, if that's what you're thinking right now, and you want to throw this away, I would strongly recommend against that. And there are, there, there now is real science, and you just heard from a doctor talking about why, lift weights, run, sprint, eat protein.

• 2:38:29Jocko Willink?

  Work on your building muscles. What an awesome thing. It's going to make you better in every aspect of your life. You've been saying that since whatever number podcast. Lifting and working out will help every aspect of your life more than anything else. It's the same thing that she's saying. So bro-science converged, real science converged. We're there. Lift weights, eat clean, eat protein. That's what we're doing. She was asking about protein, right? We know, and one of the things she's got in the book is 30 grams of protein. Like get that 30 grams of protein at every meal. That's what, guess what a molk is? Guess an R T D molk is 30 grams of protein. That's what we're doing out of the gate.

• 2:39:12Jocko Willink?

  And, and that's another thing she got in the book, because I read the book, I didn't read the whole thing today, but she was like, hey, if you're going to somewhere where there may be inappropriate foods. Before you go there, have a molk before you go there. Yeah. Have a molk before you go there. And that way you get there, instead of having six slices of freaking pizza. Maybe you have a singular slice. And you could bargain with yourself, well, I would rather just have four pieces, not have the, no, have the protein, have something that's good for you, then go there. The other point that I brought up about wait till tomorrow to take a day off, wait till tomorrow to have the pizza? Good advice. Yeah. So that's what we're doing. Get that protein in, but molk. And she also asked me about, do I go off the path?

• 2:39:56Jocko Willink?

  Bro, if I think about back in the day, how much mint chocolate chip ice cream I used to have.

• 2:40:01Jocko Willink?

  Before molk. And now molk tastes so good. It's, it, it gives you the sa- this satiety. I think that's a word. Satiation. The satisfaction. Sure. Of having a dessert. Yeah. And yet it's protein. Yeah. So good for you. So that's what we're doing. You should do that too, by the way.

• 2:40:23Jocko Willink?

  JacoFuel.com

• 2:40:24Speaker 02

  It's true.

• 2:40:25Jocko Willink?

  JacoFuel.com Uh, get some of that, get some of that protein. Get some of that. Get some hydrate, get some greens, creatine and greens. Are you doing that combo yet? Are you doing hydrate and greens?

• 2:40:37Speaker 02

  Hydrate, no, hydrate, creatine.

• 2:40:38Jocko Willink?

  Hydrate, creatine. Get the creatine in your system. It's another thing that's gonna just, Jack, if you, uh, did you get the reports from K-Dog?

• 2:40:46Speaker 02

  About the three wheels?

• 2:40:47Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, he's, he's up to three wheels, first time. So Kerry, first time in his life, by the way. How old's Kerry?

• 2:40:56Speaker 02

  Thirty something.

• 2:40:57Jocko Willink?

  Thirty, thirty something.

• 2:40:58Speaker 02

  Thirty-six.

• 2:40:59Jocko Willink?

  Never, never. Never benched three wheels before.

• 2:41:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, well. He has now.

• 2:41:06Jocko Willink?

  No, he has now.

• 2:41:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, before I get to.

• 2:41:08Jocko Willink?

  Well, guess what? Get some of that Jocko creatine, part of the program.

• 2:41:11Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:41:11Jocko Willink?

  And all of a sudden you're getting stronger. So that's what we're doing.

• 2:41:13Speaker 02

  Right, and there's no denying that, right? If you're like, hey, I've never benched three fifteen, doesn't matter if it's three fifteen, two wheels, four wheels, whatever. If you, if you're like, hey, I've never done this, but I do want to get this, and, and you take creatine versus not take creatine, creatine's gonna get you there quicker. Oh, yeah. Um, and.

• 2:41:30Jocko Willink?

  Factually.

• 2:41:30Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, factually, and that. And so this is, this is what Gabrielle Lyons said, actually, after we were recording, she brought up the creatine.

• 2:41:38Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 2:41:39Speaker 02

  So it was like, it was yet another confirmation. That the creatine, among other things, are one of these things that men, if you, if you implement these certain things in, in, into your protocol.

• 2:41:51Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Another thing, in your protocol, speaking protocol, seriously, joint warfare. Take joint warfare. Take krill oil. Take time war. These things. Are so good, so good for you. Anyways, you guys know the deal. Jocko Fuel, go to JacoFuel.com. That's where, that's where you can get it. You can also get it at Vitamin Shoppe, GNC, Military Commissaries, Hanafys, or Afees, Hanafords, Dash Stores in Maryland, Wakeford, ShopRite, HEB, HEB down in Tejas. Get in there. Appreciate you all down in Texas. Just keeping it real. Keeping it real down there. The reports we're getting, you all are going in there and just getting after it. So that's appreciated. Same thing with Meyer up in the Midwest. Thank you. Go in there and get after it. We're doing some good deals at these places right now too. Create kinda crazy. So,

• 2:42:35Jocko Willink?

  get in there. Harris Teeter, Lifetime Fitness, Shields, small gyms everywhere. If you've got a gym and you want to sell Jocko Fuel so everyone at your gym can get stronger, faster, smarter, and healthier, email [email protected]. That's what we're doing. Jacofuel.com. Get some.

• 2:42:53Speaker 02

  It's true. Also, Origin USA. American made, American manufacturing, back to America.

• 2:43:00Jocko Willink?

  Hundred percent.

• 2:43:00Speaker 02

  It got kinda almost lost for a while.

• 2:43:02Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it did almost get lost. They were down to the last, and we got it. We have the knowledge. Now we got 20-year-olds that know how to operate a loom. That's what we're doing. So yeah, originusa.com. Got everything you need. We got workout gear, we got jiu-jitsu gear, rash guards, gis, jiu-jitsu gis that feel good. Like another element of the world has come into play. Not to mention jeans, boots, hoodies, t-shirts, the whole thing. Originusa.com. American manufacturing. None of this matters. None of the, anything that we're talking about matters if our country falls apart. So, one

• 2:43:44Jocko Willink?

  of the components of that is economic strength. Why, where do we get economic strength? We have to be able to make things. We have to be self-reliant. We have to start somewhere. Where do you start? Originusa.com. Crush communism. Support America. That's what we're doing.

• 2:44:02Speaker 02

  That's what we're doing. Also, Jocko has a store called Jocko Store, AKA Def Core. Look, this is if you want to represent on the path. You don't care if someone's looking cool, if someone, if no one's looking cool, but you still representing, this is where you go.

• 2:44:16Jocko Willink?

  This is where you get your stuff. Shirts, hoodies, got into some, uh, we got a new hoodie, the quick flip one. Multiple purposes, you know, converts into a, anyway, check it out. Uh, this plan equals freedom has.

• 2:44:29Speaker 02

  We have a new discipline equals freedom standard shirt 2024 coming up. Be on the lookout for that. It's not out yet, but if you sign up for the email list on the on the on the store on the bottom there, you can get alerted when they come out. So you can get the first wave, the first edition, as one might say. Anyway, also, there's a we have a little program if you were, if you will, subscription scenario called the shirt locker. That's a new design, representing discipline equals freedom in one way or another, a little bit different, I get it, but you can get a new one every month.

• 2:45:03Jocko Willink?

  You like that, don't you?

• 2:45:03Speaker 02

  I very much, very much.

• 2:45:04Jocko Willink?

  You like that whole thing?

• 2:45:05Speaker 02

  I do.

• 2:45:06Jocko Willink?

  Everything you get to say there. You ever?

• 2:45:09Speaker 02

  I like what we get to do. How about that?

• 2:45:11Jocko Willink?

  You like this.

• 2:45:12Speaker 02

  Um, so, speaking of what I like, the, the, uh, the new sugar coated lies shirt for the shirt locker for March has been deployed.

• 2:45:23Jocko Willink?

  Okay, it's out there in the world.

• 2:45:25Speaker 02

  It's in production. No, no, no, hasn't, hasn't, sorry, in production, sorry, not deployed, like, they're not offered yet. It starts in March, March 1st. But yeah, it's good. It's good.

• 2:45:34Jocko Willink?

  And it's not what someone would think, or it is what someone would think?

• 2:45:37Speaker 02

  Put it this way, well, I think if you look at it, this is what I think. I don't know, I can't read everybody's mind. But I predict that if you see it, you'll see the layers and you'll be like, I like it. I'm down for the, for the design. Anyway, it's called the shirt locker. You like new designs every month. That's where you can get it. Jocko store.com.

• 2:45:56Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Also, speaking of getting things, we talked about steak today.

• 2:45:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:46:00Jocko Willink?

  On this podcast.

• 2:46:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:46:02Jocko Willink?

  With Gabrielle. We talked about steak. Get yourself some steak. Get yourself some good steak. Go to primalbeef.com or coloradocraftbeef.com and get yourself some steak that tastes delicious and will give you protein. That's what you're looking for? Protein forward.

• 2:46:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:46:18Jocko Willink?

  I kind of like that.

• 2:46:19Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:46:19Jocko Willink?

  Protein forward. I've been, I told her I've been protein forward for a long time.

• 2:46:23Speaker 02

  I'm with you.

• 2:46:23Jocko Willink?

  Protein forward. You know what helps you be protein forward? Colorado craftbeef.com, primalbeef.com. Go get yourself some steak. That's what we're doing. Also subscribe to the podcast. Also, jocko underground.com. Also YouTube channels. There's this YouTube channel. There's Jocko Fuel YouTube channel. They just put up a funny one. Did you see the one with chail? They put up one with chails on it. It's really good. Chail's a freaking character. And he's beating his son with a belt.

• 2:46:53Jocko Willink?

  Sure, hell yeah. And his son is like, just, they're just having a blast, man. It's just so freaking cool to see. Uh, so check that one out. Also, Origin USA. So check that one out. We just did a little behind the scenes filming. We had a, a meeting down there in North Carolina at the factory talking about the, we're, we're now looking at the clothing that we're bringing out in 2025. Some of it's 2024, but we're trying to plan more in advance and just bringing in better quality stuff, more options for everyone and made 100% in the United States of America, as I mentioned. So check that one out as well. Origin USA is the YouTube channel. Is that what it's called?

• 2:47:38Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, YouTube channel. Okay. So there you go. Psychological Warfare, Flipside Canvas, Dakota Meyer, making cool stuff to hang on your wall. We got a bunch of books. Obviously, the book we just covered today, Forever Strong by Gabriel, Dr. Gabriel Lyon. So check that one out. Also, I've written a bunch of books, Leadership Strategy and Tactics Field Manual, Final Spin, Code the Evaluation Protocol, Discipline vs. Freedom Field Manual. I brought that up a couple times. It's 2017. How old is that? Six years? Almost seven years? Almost seven years old. Guess what? Still pertinent. Pert, even, you know what? More pertinent. There's no information that you're like, oh, well, that was back then. No, no, no. It's holding up and it's holding up well.

• 2:48:21Jocko Willink?

  She was saying stuff today. She's starting, starting to talk about the brain benefits of exercise. It's in the book. Discipline vs. Freedom Field Manual. Check it out. Uh, and of course, I've written a bunch of kids books. Kids books. Your kids need to be on the path. Your neighbor's kids need to be on the path. Your, your nieces and nephews and grandkids, get them on the path. Send them in the right direction. Wave the Warrior Kids series. Check those out. Mikey and the Dragos. Check that out. Also, Extreme Ownership, Dichotomy Leadership, Hackworth, About Face. These are all books. We have a leadership consultancy, EchelonFront.com. If you want us to come out and help you with your organization,

• 2:49:01Jocko Willink?

  you can do that. Also, we have an online training academy, Extreme Ownership Academy. Go to ExtremeOwnership.com if you want to learn how to lead yourself and others through this arduous world that we're in.

• 2:49:18Jocko Willink?

  It's called life. You need skills. You can learn them. Extreme ownership.com. Check it out. If you want to help service members, active and retired, you want to help their families, Gold Star families, check out Mark Lee's mom, Mama Lee. She's got an incredible charity organization. If you want to help, you want to donate, you want to get involved, go to Americas Mighty Warriors.org. Also, Micah Fink up in the mountains, Heroes and Horses.org. Also Jimmy May's organization, Beyond the Brotherhood.org. And then of course, we have Hunter Seven and the Seal Future Foundation, which Gabrielle talked about today. Check all those out if you want to support. If you want to connect with us for Gabrielle,

• 2:50:01Jocko Willink?

  she's got Dr. Gabrielle Lyon.com. She's also on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, which is now called X, by the way. Did you know that?

• 2:50:09Speaker 02

  I hear. Good things.

• 2:50:10Jocko Willink?

  And she has a YouTube channel. So you can find her in all those locations, Dr. Gabrielle Lyon. And it's Dr. D R. It's not like the full word. So that's where you can find her. And if you want to connect with Echo and I, I'm at Jocko Wilk, Echo's at Echo Char. Just be careful, because you go in there, you got your head down, you're kind of like not aware of what's going on. You start, your thumb starts, your finger starts moving up, swiping.

• 2:50:36Speaker 02

  Scrolling.

• 2:50:37Jocko Willink?

  Scrolling.

• 2:50:37Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 2:50:38Jocko Willink?

  It's called infinite scroll. That's what it's called. It's called infinite scroll. Did you know that?

• 2:50:44Speaker 02

  No.

• 2:50:45Jocko Willink?

  It's a thing. It didn't used to exist.

• 2:50:47Speaker 02

  Infinite scroll.

• 2:50:48Jocko Willink?

  Infinite scroll.

• 2:50:49Speaker 02

  When you're just going, just scrolling.

• 2:50:50Jocko Willink?

  No end in sight. No end in sight. And they invented that. They invented that. It didn't exist. A little while ago, you'd scroll and get to the bottom. And guess what you'd do then? Stop scrolling. You freaking go pick up a kettlebell.

• 2:51:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, it said you're all caught up.

• 2:51:03Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:04Speaker 02

  Remember that? Wait, does it not say that anymore?

• 2:51:06Jocko Willink?

  No.

• 2:51:06Speaker 02

  I haven't seen that in a while.

• 2:51:07Jocko Willink?

  It's infinite scroll. Think about that. Infinite scroll. So you can get on and you can start to scroll and you can never leave. Then you die.

• 2:51:19Jocko Willink?

  It's called yeah. And by the way, the things that showing you brutal are things that you want. I've heard now they're they're uh it can see you and it's watching your eyes. Well, it definitely knows how long like when you scroll past something and it's like, oh, jujitsu. Oh, that's a good guard pass. You watch it. Oh, yeah. Shows you another guard pass. Shows you another guard pass and then you go, you see a, you see a karate thing. You scroll right by that. It doesn't show you anymore karate, goes back to jujitsu. Now it shows like the details. Yeah. Now it's showing you a gi. Now it's, you know what I mean? It's, it's like troubleshooting your thing. It's, it's like an infinite scroll customized for your dumb ass.

• 2:52:02Jocko Willink?

  So don't fall into it. Yeah. That's what it is. So just be careful. The algorithm, it's a monster. And by the way, we are only able to be sitting here tonight doing what we're doing because of our military troops out there right now sacrificing their freedoms so we can keep ours. So thanks to all of our troops. Also thanks to our police, law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, border patrol, secret service, as well as all other first responders. Thank you for your sacrifices to keep us safe here at home. And to everyone else out there.

• 2:52:35Jocko Willink?

  It's simple, but it's not easy. Simple, but it's not easy. Don't eat the junk.

• 2:52:43Jocko Willink?

  Lift heavy things. Move. Don't submit your movements. Run, sprint. Get the protein you need. Train. This is not complicated. It's not complicated. This isn't rocket science. This isn't brain surgery.

• 2:53:02Jocko Willink?

  It's not complicated, but you have to have discipline. You have to have discipline. You have to impose discipline to get up every day, go out there and get after it. Until next time, this is Echo and Jocko out.