332: Influence & Ownership Over Your Physiological & Psychological Being w/ Andrew Huberman

Andrew Huberman, Ph. D., is a neuroscientist and tenured Professor in the Department of Neurobiology at the Stanford University School of Medicine. He has made numerous significant contributions to the fields of brain development, brain function and neural plasticity, which is the ability of our nervous system to rewire and learn new behaviors, skills and cognitive functioning. 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 332 with Echo Charles and me Jocko Willink. Good evening Echo. Good evening. So when I first started this podcast, when we first started this podcast,

• 0:16Jocko Willink?

  I was talking about different situations, how I handled different situations, what I thought about various subjects, different viewpoints I had concerning leadership and really concerning human nature. And almost immediately started getting feedback and started getting asked questions and people would say, "Hey, have you studied Stoicism or are you, did you do a lot of work, you know, looking at Nietzsche or some other ancient or modern school of philosophy?"

• 0:54Jocko Willink?

  And the short answer was that, no, I didn't. I didn't do that. I mean, I left high school to join the military. So there wasn't this big educational background for me. I'm not an academic of any kind. In fact, there was a funny, one of the earliest live events that I did, and it was a relatively cultured audience out there. And someone asked, you know, "Hey, who's your favorite philosopher?" And I said, "Lemmy."

• 1:26Jocko Willink?

  And no one laughed. Like, I laughed, but no one else laughed. And so I added, I said, you know, "Lemmy from Motorhead." And a couple of people sort of awkwardly laughed, but not much. And later on, we explored this idea a little bit more on the podcast. And because, look, there's much to be learned from old philosophers and old thinkers. And as it turns out, I agree with and I'm aligned with a lot of what they say, no doubt about it. I'm not trying to say anything negative about these ancient philosophers and the theories that they had.

• 2:02Jocko Willink?

  But the fact of the matter is, I just didn't study them. I mean, like I said, I was a shitty high school student. I didn't, I don't think I read any books in high school. So, yeah, I didn't learn anything about these things. I just figured these things out through my own random trials and tribulations in life.

• 2:25Jocko Willink?

  And it was a similar situation with, with Jordan Peterson. When, when he came on the podcast for the first time, it was really obvious that we had come to many of the same conclusions in our views of life. But he got to those conclusions through a rigorous academic study and work as a clinical psychologist. And I got there through my experiences in life and in the teams. And I've been very lucky in, in that regard. Very lucky to kind of stumble into things, been guided in certain situations, been shoved

• 3:05Jocko Willink?

  in some directions, made some good decisions along the way, made some bad decisions and been lucky enough to live through it and learn, learn from it. So I've been very, very lucky, but I also pay attention to these kinds of things. A lot of times I was paying attention to these kinds of things because I, I was trying to teach them. I originally started paying attention to leadership because I had to learn it in order to become a leader. So I was paying attention and I was watching what leaders were doing. And eventually I was paying attention to leadership because I was teaching it. And so I saw things and I stumbled into things. And, but you know, one of the things I wrote about leadership strategy and tactics, I'm

• 3:47Jocko Willink?

  in my first platoon, we're, we're clearing gas, oil platforms. I do a big write-up about this and in that book, but my platoon ends up on a skirmish line. We're all, we're all looking down our weapons, looking to engage targets and no one's making a call. No one's making any kind of a decision. And I, as a new guy, I take a step back, which means I broaden my field of view. I look around so I can see more and I, a nice calm comes over me and now I can see what we need to do and I make a call. And I started to teach that. I started to teach that to young leaders. Hey, you need to take a step back. You need to broaden your field of view. You need to look around and it's going to calm you down and allow you to make a decision.

• 4:32Jocko Willink?

  I also would tell guys, "Hey, you need to take a breath." And I didn't have some, you know, I wasn't saying you need to take some spiritual transcendent breath. You need to reach deep into your inner soul and breathe. I wasn't saying that. The actual reason I was saying it was because you don't want to sound panicked when you come up on the radio. You don't want to come up on the radio and say, "We need to get everyone over this building." You don't want to do that.

• 4:57Jocko Willink?

  You don't want to do it. Number one, because everyone else is going to now panic. And number two, because everyone's going to make fun of you when you get back from this operation. So you don't want to either one of these. So when you have to make a decision, you take a step back and then you take a breath.

• 5:10Jocko Willink?

  You detach, you broaden your field of view. And these things will calm you down and allow you to make better decisions.

• 5:20Jocko Willink?

  And recently, I've heard some podcasts. Tim Ferriss and Joe Rogan, by the way. They've had a guy on a couple of times named Andrew Huberman. And this guy is a doctor, a neuroscientist, a professor. And as I was listening to what he was saying, a lot of the things that I have been teaching were aligned with what he was saying. And believe it or not, one of the things was a broad field of vision calms you down. Taking a breath is something that scientifically calms you down. Physiologically calms you down. Broadening your field of view physiologically calms you down. And guess what?

• 6:03Jocko Willink?

  I know this, the calmer you are, the better decisions you're going to make.

• 6:08Jocko Willink?

  Then there were other things, when I listened to him talk, that I recognized from my own experiences. Cold water. It doesn't feel good when you get in it, but it feels good when you get done. Lifting weights, fasting, things that I had kind of instinctively or through trial and error figured out were now being reinforced by someone that actually academically understood the science behind my instincts.

• 6:39Jocko Willink?

  Now, my instincts are not always right by any stretch of the imagination. I, I can, I should probably write an entire litany of books about the dumb things I've done. But I'm always looking to see, hey, if there's some things I'm doing right, why are they right? If there's things I'm doing wrong, why are they wrong? And always looking to increase the understanding that I have behind the things that I think I've figured out. Which is why we are fortunate to have Dr. Andrew Huberman here with us tonight to help explain and explore

• 7:19Jocko Willink?

  what we think, what we think we know, what we think we think, and how we can get better at all of the above. Andrew, thanks for coming down, man. It's good to meet you.

• 7:30Speaker 01

  Great to be here.

• 7:32Jocko Willink?

  Did that, um, when I was listening to you talk and I was hearing you talk about how you're, if you're focused on something small, it amps up your adrenaline. I was, I was listening, I was going, oh, it was all these things were coming together. All these dots were getting connected. It's kind of crazy, right?

• 7:50Speaker 01

  It's pretty wild. I mean, I think some people may know this. Many people probably won't was, which is that your eyes are two pieces of your brain. They're the only two pieces of your brain. And yes, they are brain. For those of you that want to look it up, they're part of your central nervous system and they're outside your cranial vault. And they're, are there to set the aperture, right? The either tunnel vision or the broad field of view, not just on your vision, but on your thinking, which is what you described. And widening your field of view, your visual aperture will allow you to parse more information. It also changes your perception of time.

• 8:33Speaker 01

  So the simplest way to put this is that when you are in a narrow field of view, It's a bit like having a video camera in slow motion. Your frame rate is higher, but in that small aperture, you're looking at minor details. As soon as you hear it, you think duh, of course. But the opposite is also true. When you broaden your field of view, and that could be by literally moving your head around, but it can also just be by keeping your head more or less stationary and just deliberately broadening your field of view. We call it panoramic vision. You are taking smaller frame rate, or I should say, sorry, larger bins of time. But the way the visual system works is really clever. It actually allows you to sense motion more quickly.

• 9:16Speaker 01

  So when you run and catch a ball, or when you're walking along and you blink and a bee hits your eyelid, you didn't see it coming, see in quotes, but you were in that panoramic field of view and your reaction time is four times what it is when you're in that narrow aperture.

• 9:32Jocko Willink?

  Now, again, I just want to reiterate this and just clarify this. For like 20 years, I have been teaching young SEAL leaders and then, you know, other people in the world, in the business world, in the, in the first responder world, in the military at large. For 20 years, I've been saying, hey, listen, when things start to get, get wild, you need to get off your gun, you need to take a step back, you need to broaden your field of view, you need to look around to see what's happening. I've been telling people that for 20 years, only because it just worked for me. And I luckily figured that out in my very first SEAL platoon. And, and it took me a while to where I said, oh, that's something I need to tell other people to do.

• 10:15Jocko Willink?

  Like I figured it out and would do it, but then once I was in a position where I was teaching these things. So that's just like wild that there's all these physiological things that occur that for me was, I, I knew it, I knew that you better do this. Cause I mean, imagine you want to talk about a field of view, imagine what your field of view is like when you're staring down the, the barrel of your gun. It's tiny. Your field of view is so focused and you don't see anything. I mean, other than the target right in front of you, you don't see anything. And that's what happens to, when, when a young SEAL is in a leadership position, that's what happens to them. They get, they, they're looking down their weapon and they don't see anything that's, that's happening. They can't make any decisions because they don't see the entire picture. They, they see nothing. So.

• 10:59Jocko Willink?

  That's kind of crazy and that's again, these are just some of the examples that I've pulled from listening to you and listen to your podcast, by the way, Huberman Lab. Before we get down any more rabbit holes, let's, let's talk about where you came from, how you ended up in this spot, because I would say you didn't take sort of a standard route to end up where you ended up. So let's talk about young Andrew Huberman. What's going on? Where are you born?

• 11:24Speaker 01

  I was actually born in Stanford Hospital.

• 11:26Jocko Willink?

  Oh, okay.

• 11:28Speaker 01

  I joke, I, you know, I was born at Stanford Hospital. I trained at Stanford. I work at Stanford. I'll probably die at Stanford. Hopefully a long time from now. You know, people say you're gonna die in your office. There are worse places to die than Stanford.

• 11:39Jocko Willink?

  How were you born there? Like, why?

• 11:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, so my-

• 11:42Jocko Willink?

  Did your parents work there or something?

• 11:44Speaker 01

  My dad's from South America. He actually came here, um, he's a physicist, but he came here from Argentina on a Navy scholarship. So the Navy paid for my dad to leave Argentina where there were no opportunities to do science. Came to the US, went to University of Pennsylvania. Over the years, he's worked on various projects related to government. I actually don't know a ton about what he does now. But growing up, uh, well, he met my mother in New York City and she's from the East Coast, from Jersey. And my grandfather, um, went to college on the GI Bill. So he was a World War II vet. And my mom, while he was in graduate school, and he was a real physical guy. That'll come up later, you know.

• 12:22Jocko Willink?

  Your dad was?

• 12:23Speaker 01

  My grandma, my grandfather on my mom's side.

• 12:25Jocko Willink?

  Okay, got it.

• 12:26Speaker 01

  Um, so my dad, my mom met, moved to California and had my sister and I. And this was a time, I should say, when Palo Alto's, you know, no dot com, no Silicon Valley, in the scope of wealth in the Bay Area, we were, we were middle class. We weren't upper middle class. So we, single, single story home. I mean, we didn't, we didn't want for things. You know, I didn't imagine about having Ferraris or any of that. We didn't. But there were kids in the other high school. There are two high schools in Palo Alto. I went to the one where all the nerdy kids went. It's actually called Gun High School, uh, G U N. And it has a funny reputation, not funny, it has an infamous reputation. It's the highest suicide rate of any high school in the United States for reasons that we can talk about. So-

• 13:06Speaker 01

  From the time I was born until about age thirteen, I had a pretty, I would say a kind of magical childhood. A bunch of young boys about my age lived down the street. Their older sisters, they all seemed to have older sisters, were about my sister's age. And so it was biking around and skateboarding around, playing baseball in the street, soccer, swimming. Those are big sports in the Bay Area. And we ate dinner together every night as a family. You know, we, it was kind of a great life and

• 13:36Jocko Willink?

  And this is, so this is like this until you're around thirteen?

• 13:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, until I was thirteen. And then my parents split up. This was at a time in the eighties when I think there was only one other kid in school with divorced parents. Remember these times? Right now, it's, you know, it's rampant. But, and unfortunately, they didn't have the skills to handle it properly. So just imagine the rulebook of all the things parents aren't supposed to do in a divorce. They, they basically systematically broke every one of those. My dad moved away and was overseas for a bit. And I was at home with my mom and she struggled with the fracture of our family in a major way. This was right about the time I hit puberty. So it's like throwing gasoline on fire, right? And at the time, I was a bit into skateboarding. This was early days of the Bones Brigade and animal chin videos. Okay, so for those of you

• 14:24Speaker 01

  that don't know, you can look it up and you get a sense. But I quickly got into the skateboard community and dropped everything else. Stopped playing soccer, really stopped doing any kind of structured school sports and things of that sort, and just got really into skateboarding. And the reason I got into skateboarding was, A, you didn't need your dad to go, right? Soccer, all the other kids had dads there. My dad wasn't there. It was kind of embarrassing. My mom would have gone. And I actually, she would have been the one shouting the loudest. And she's from Jersey after all. She's got teeth. But, you know, Boy Scouts wasn't going to be my thing. I had some friends that went into Eagle Scouts. Guys were playing lacrosse and water polo. And, you know, skateboarding made a lot more sense. And so what ended up

• 15:09Speaker 01

  happening was from about thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, I started riding the seven F bus up to San Francisco. There was a big gathering of kids in Justin Herman Plaza, the now infamous, famous EMB crowd, the Embarcadero. And this was a scene, a very nascent scene at the time of young, feral guys, it was almost exclusively guys, that hung out there all day long. None of them went to school. They drank forty ounces and forty-ouncers and, you know, people were smoking weed and drinking and skateboarding and there were fights and people would rip off tourists and it was it was kind of a rough scene, but there was also some amazing skateboarding. Now, I never really liked drugs or alcohol, so I lucked out in that way. For me, it was all about the skateboarding.

• 15:54Speaker 01

  And over the years, you know, those early years of going up there, I got to know a lot of guys. I would say about a third of them have, just to give you a sense of where it went, about a third of them have gone on to found companies and do really well. I'm fortunate to be friendly with guys like Danny Way. I talked to, you know, I remember the young Rob Gerdick coming through and a lot of guys went on to create some impressive things and did very well. About a third are just living their lives and I don't know where they are. And about a full third of the guys I knew from back then are dead or in jail. So I saw a lot of fights, a lot of drinking, a lot of guys got their girlfriends pregnant. It was a mix, you know, and I suppose, looking back in that time, I was kind of aimless, right? I wasn't that good a skateboarder.

• 16:38Speaker 01

  I want to be really clear because the skateboarding community is kind of ruthless in terms of the holding accountability, almost as much or probably as much as in the teams, right? I have a number of friends from the teams. Like, you want to be very careful with what one implies. And so I don't want to imply that I was fated to become a Danny Way or anything. I didn't have the skills. Actually, my body wasn't developed yet. I kept getting hurt. I was skinny, I kept breaking feet and, you know, getting hurt doing things that other guys could do trivially. So that was really tough and I kept feeling like I couldn't keep up, but all my friends were there and, you know, I could throw out a bunch of names, but I will mention some of the brighter lights in that scene. You know, I got to see and witness great skateboarding from a guy named Mike Carroll, who's an incredible skateboarder.

• 17:21Speaker 01

  And his older brother, Greg Carroll, was kind of a big brother to all these parentless kids. I also learned that going to school was an option for certain kids in the city. And here I was, this kid from Palo Alto, and I thought, well, I just won't go anymore. Well, what ended up happening was someone took notice and that I wasn't in school. And one day, when I was back in high school, supposed to be ninth grade, I got called into the office and I was sitting down and they were talking to me, you know, how are things at home? How are things going? They start probing. There was this guy sitting in the corner and at some point, I realized, I think they're going to take me away. So that's what ended up happening.

• 18:01Jocko Willink?

  How much school did you skip?

• 18:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, I could tell you more about the curbs in the Gunn High School parking lot than I can tell you about any classes I took up until about the 11th grade. And in the 11th grade, as the story goes, the only reason I really went there is because there was a girl in the 12th grade who was very beautiful, who for whatever reason had a lapse of judgment and decided to go out with me and then ended up being my girlfriend and and I'm grateful to her because as the story eventually goes, you know, that was the reason I went off to college at all. Although that didn't go well either. So I wasn't going much at all. And so my grades were not good.

• 18:36Jocko Willink?

  And your mom was just, was she working at this time? What was she doing? Or she's like just?

• 18:40Speaker 01

  She was working.

• 18:41Jocko Willink?

  Allowing you to go to San Francisco and skate all day?

• 18:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, allowing me, in air quotes. I remember me and a guy who has gone on to do very well as a documentary filmmaker, Jake Rosenberg. He actually made the Waiting for Lightning documentary about Danny Way. And a couple of other guys took Jacob's parents Volvo van again, or whatever those wagon things, I forget what those were. I don't know if they sold me, those are pretty cool. We piled into that and we all went to the Reno Nationals for a week mid exams, you know, and just kind of went out there. I think we forged signatures. Kids, don't do this, by the way. I'm a professor now. I just want to say for the record, wait to get your tattoos. Don't get the pulled ear earrings for reasons that don't even need explanation. And please, please stay in school.

• 19:26Speaker 01

  But went up there, I had managed to get picked up by a wheel company and a truck company.

• 19:32Jocko Willink?

  What truck company?

• 19:33Speaker 01

  Thunder Trucks. And they put me on.

• 19:36Jocko Willink?

  What wheel company?

• 19:37Speaker 01

  It was Spitfire.

• 19:37Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 19:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:38Jocko Willink?

  So you were like at least riding.

• 19:41Speaker 01

  I would, I couldn't manage.

• 19:42Jocko Willink?

  And getting free trucks. That's all you were getting, wasn't it?

• 19:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, so.

• 19:45Jocko Willink?

  They didn't give you any money, did they?

• 19:46Speaker 01

  No. So, so gosh, because somewhere out there, the great Jim Thebow, who owns Deluxe, which is real skateboards and all anti-hero and all this, probably listening. Thank you, Jim. He put me on out of sympathy. I was hanging around the factory at Deluxe. So in San Francisco, there's an amazing thing about skateboarding that I'm guessing most people don't know, which was this guy Fausto Vitello, who started Thrasher Magazine and also independent trucks, the great independent trucks. And then he had a brilliant idea, which was, why don't we just make a bunch of companies, Thunder, Spitfire, Venture? Well, guess what, folks? It's all the same company. And so kids, you know, you say, oh, I ride thunders. No, I ride indies. It's all

• 20:28Speaker 01

  ermico. That's where they poured the stuff. So during those years of high school, I started going up to the factory and hanging around the factory, which is in Hunter's Point, which is the only truly dangerous part of San Francisco, at least at the time was the only truly dangerous part. And you had to really watch yourself there. I saw a guy get pushed off a motorcycle, beaten up in his motorcycle, taken at a stoplight midday. This is, you know, this is really rough blocks. And so, you know, here I was, this 14 year old kid from Palo Alto, getting a pretty quick street education. Started getting into fights a little bit. Like I said, fortunately, didn't like drugs or alcohol because.

• 21:02Jocko Willink?

  And you just randomly didn't like drugs or alcohol? Was there something in your parenting that made you feel that way? Did you not like the loss of control?

• 21:12Speaker 01

  You know, it was probably the drugs and alcohol that I was exposed to. So alcohol made me feel kind of sedated, as it does, as a four brain inhibitor, as we'd say in neuroscience. And the drugs, at the time, people were mostly smoking weed and hash, taking LSD and mushrooms. And none of that really appealed. I mean, I do have a drug and it's adrenaline. I love the clarity of mind and the energy that comes from adrenaline. And I learned early on, that beautiful, but very dangerous edge where everything is clear, you have immense amounts of energy, and if you can regulate a bit, you're incredibly calm. And yet there's that readiness in your body, I'm sure, as I described this

• 21:55Speaker 01

  many people, and especially you guys will know this feeling very well. And it's a very drug like state, right? It's as powerful as being in love and lust all at once, right? It just hits that, it's a, it's a beautiful tunnel. And I fell in love with it pretty early on. And I also love camaraderie, right? So my family quickly became this big group of feral kids and some older guys that. Really took care of all of us.

• 22:21Jocko Willink?

  Are you going home at night? Are you like squatting somewhere?

• 22:24Speaker 01

  So not sleeping on the street. There were guys that slept in Barcadero all the time. I wasn't one of those. Um, I would stay at this guy Ray Myers' house. He was a skateboarder and, uh, but also a computer programmer. And, um, and this links back to that day where they were going to take me away. I ended up leaving to the city. I ran away.

• 22:40Jocko Willink?

  So, so.

• 22:41Speaker 01

  I bolted.

• 22:42Jocko Willink?

  I messed up your story. That was your freshman year?

• 22:44Speaker 01

  That was be, that was my freshman year, maybe early sophomore year.

• 22:47Jocko Willink?

  And you think these guys are going to take me?

• 22:49Speaker 01

  Right.

• 22:50Jocko Willink?

  And put me in some kind of whatever.

• 22:51Speaker 01

  Right. So I took off. I went to Ray's house. I took the bus up to San Francisco. I bolted. I think I said I had to use the bathroom and then they went. Obviously they weren't thinking who they were dealing with. Um, and I went to Ray's house. He lived in his parents attic. He was a computer programmer and also a professional skateboarder. Um, one of the more stable people in that, in that world.

• 23:17Jocko Willink?

  What year is this?

• 23:18Speaker 01

  So this would be 1989.

• 23:20Jocko Willink?

  Sure.

• 23:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, you know, and, and I don't look anything like, well, I had shaved head and, you know, like, you know, and maybe my hair might've been dyed blue black or something. And I was just excited because, um, you know, I had whatever new pair of kicks on and, and was, oh, and the thunder thing, if you rode for thunder back then, you got this shirt that, um, is in my high school yearbook and I saw it the other day, which says, uh, I ride for thunder trucks and all I got was this lousy T-shirt. And they only made a few of them. And I, if you have one of those out there, I'd love to, love to see it. Um, but I went to Ray's and stayed there for a bit. And at one point he said, you know, you can't stay here. And I said, why not? And he's like, I live at home with my parents. Like this is weird. You live in my house, you know, you have to go home. So eventually I went back and then it was no forgiveness.

• 24:05Speaker 01

  They, they took me to a place up the peninsula, which was neither juvenile hall, nor a mental hospital, nor jail. It was this kind of truant troubled kids place. And I'll never forget what they told us. They said, okay, there's an adult ward over there and they're crazy. And then there are these little kids younger than you. I think it was younger than 14 in this other building. And they're really disturbed. But you guys, you're normal. You just have a lot of problems. And I thought to myself, that's definitely what they're telling the people in the other buildings. But what happened was I was on a 72 hour hold, you know, I hadn't done anything. I hadn't harmed anyone or myself. So, and it was on the third day that one of the counselors there who was a really good guy, you know, we sometimes forget that the people that do that kind of

• 24:50Speaker 01

  low income work with kids like me back then and kids now, um, probably in graduate school or something, a lot of these people have their own set of problems and that's what led them there. And he sat down and he said, listen, you can get out of here and go right back to what you were doing, or you can ask whether or not there's anything here of value. And at the time I was pretty frightened. Um, I was in this place, my roommate was this guy, he looked like Richard Ramirez, the Night Stalker. Big guy. If you haven't seen that documentary on, that'll make you never want to live in Los Angeles County, although Richard Ramirez was happy to travel to kill you, it turned out. Um, so I remember staying up at night and being really frightened. I thought, I don't know if this guy's gonna try and harm

• 25:34Speaker 01

  me in any kind of way. Turned out he was just another sad story of somebody who was just really, really troubled. He was really, oddly, he was one of the bigger, more dangerous looking guys in the place, but he was cutting on the bottoms of his feet so that no one would see. Horrible. Met some good kids in there who, uh, you know, had different sets of problems than me. A lot of them, drug problems, some of them had been molested. Fortunately, I never experienced that. Um, you know, and I was like, wow, like, I'm in trouble, right? I'm, I'm, this is a long way from home. It's also a long way from Embarcadero. I called my team manager, I'm gonna name him this time because we're friends now. His name was Steve, is Steve Rugi, Shrugie. Um, really good guy. Team manager from Thunder Trucks?

• 26:19Speaker 01

  From Thunder and Delux. And again, they put me on the flow team out of sympathy. Thank you, Steve. Thanks, Shrug. And I called him and I said, listen, they, they got me behind lock and key. I don't know what to do. And he said, you called me? And I said, yeah. And he said, bro, you're the most normal guy I know. And I said, I know, and I'm in here. And he said, no, including me. I can't help you. And I thought, wow, I'm in trouble. So what ended up happening was I was let out. And as a condition of being let back in school, I had to go to school, I had to chart a certain number of days, and I was assigned to do therapy twice a week. And at

• 27:02Speaker 01

  the time, no one did, or if they did, they didn't talk about therapy. This was before Goodwill Hunting. This was before any kind of sense. Actually, as a little factoid, I saw some statistics out of Stanford, I think, it was college-wide statistics in the US, that 10 years ago, if you ask college students, how many of them go to or are willing to explore therapy, it was something like 14%. Now, it's in excess of 90%. We could argue whether or not that reflects a good or a bad change. But anyway, I was assigned to a guy who was remarkable. He really understood what I was going through, which I have to imagine was just a stroke of luck. He understood that my home life didn't have structure, that

• 27:46Speaker 01

  at the time, there was no strong paternal role, even though my dad's a pretty strong-minded person, has strong opinions, he's Argentine after all. Just that I was, I was spinning out. And he strongly discouraged me from doing any drugs, because he understood that that was going to be a risk in my current configuration. And he understood that I wasn't going to get excited about school right away. I was always a reader, so I was going to Tower Books, and reading about fitness, and reading about, I loved to read about fitness, I liked history, and I liked to read about sex. So like, not the porno magazines, but I would go read a lot, like Sexual Health, I was really curious, right? And then, you know, young guy, I was like, oh, you know, there's like, protocols in here, you know, let's learn this. And about fitness, lifting weights, like the Ellington Darden books,

• 28:29Speaker 01

  and the old, you know, super slow movement stuff, and Mike Mensah. And actually, what happened was, he said, well, what do you enjoy doing? I told him what my interests were, and he said, well, you should exercise. He swims, I think, you know, you don't learn much about your therapist, if it's appropriate therapy relationship. So I started swimming about a mile a night. I would run to this pool, I'd hop the fence, because I'm a skateboarder, I'm not going to pay to go in during the day. Fences are there to go over. So I'd hop the fence, and I'd swim at night. And then I started running. And I started lifting weights and there was a teacher at our school, his name is Bob Peters, um, big guy, football player, and he taught me how to lift weights. And then I started running cross country and eventually I got a girlfriend.

• 29:12Speaker 01

  Um, I had done dating the skateboard way, like there were girls that we'd meet at contests and that kind of thing. But, um, a really nice, um, smart, uh, very sweet and kind girl whose dad actually was a real blue collar guy.

• 29:25Jocko Willink?

  How much, how much time has passed in this?

• 29:27Speaker 01

  So now I'm sixteen or so, I get my, get my driver's license.

• 29:31Jocko Willink?

  Sophomore now or maybe you're a junior?

• 29:33Speaker 01

  I'm a junior, sixteen, cause I started school in the fall, I'm a fall baby. So I was always the youngest in my class.

• 29:37Jocko Willink?

  What do you think, how did this therapist actually connect to you? Because most of the things I see with kids, yours truly included, when I was a kid, a super rebellious kid. I didn't listen to anybody like that was, you know, any adult, just didn't know anything. And how did, how do you think that person made a connection with you?

• 30:01Speaker 01

  It's a great question. No one's ever asked me that. Uh, three things. Uh, one was completely non-verbal. Uh, he was physically fit. I looked at him and I thought, yeah, I wouldn't mind looking like that dude someday. You know, I was skinny and I kept getting hurt skateboarding, right? And I thought, he wasn't really big and yoked, but he was tall and fit. He had good posture and the way he would greet me was not, he was kind. I also remember he had his, uh,

• 30:25Jocko Willink?

  So he's kind of a badass.

• 30:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. And he had his initials stitched into his socks. And I was like, I guess he probably makes good money doing this. And, but, but he wasn't, um, there was no aristocracy about him. He just, um, yeah, he, he looked like the kind of person I might want to be. He looked like he had his life together. I also remember that one day I came in and he said, you're smiling. And I said, yeah, I ollied the front eight. And he said, what does that mean? And I said, well, I do this thing. And he said, why don't you show me? So we went downstairs and did push, push, push. I think I fell a few times. Then I, you know, clicked down this front eight. We went upstairs and I was like, wow. I think that's the first time that like a grown man has cared about what I was doing.

• 31:09Speaker 01

  And so there was that seed there. This is the first time I remember that very clearly now. And then he, I remember falling asleep in his office a lot. You know, I must have been pretty out of it at times. And then when I met my girlfriend, she was a year older. I was a little intimidated. It's a whole other thing when you're just traveling and I guess they call, you know, you're just hooking up with girls or whatever. But when you actually like somebody now, they've got something to lose, right? And he really encouraged me to, he said, great advice, by the way. He said, when it comes to decision making, ask her opinion, but I think she'll appreciate if you just make the plans.

• 31:52Speaker 01

  All right. So I would pick the restaurant. I went restaurant back then. I had no money, right? But in terms of, you know, so I used to run to my girlfriend's house and wash her car. She had a Bronco, so I used to go there while she was at church on Sundays. Her dad was a blue collar guy, very little education, but had done okay in this country by buying apartments and then taking care of them himself. One of these guys with, I remember he had a hundred keys on his key. Always a sign that somebody works hard, right? Just remembering what all those keys are too. It's a memory task.

• 32:21Jocko Willink?

  What do you, what are you listening to for music right now? So as you start talking about this and I'm sitting here running through my life and thinking about, well, what kind of people had influence over me? And there was like a one of, one guy that I knew, his older brother was a Marine Corps, was in the Marine Corps and was a Marine Corps drill instructor. And, you know, in my mind, when I was like 13 years old and I saw that, I was like, okay, that dude looks like he can kick ass and that seems like a good thing to be able to do. And then, you know, as I started listening to hardcore music and all of a sudden, you know, you, you know, Henry Rollins in Black Flag is like doing pushups. And you think, okay, it looks like I need to start doing some pushups.

• 33:04Jocko Willink?

  And, and then other, some other hardcore bands where you know that the guys are working out. And I remember like my, my friends and me were like, okay, well, it looks like we're working out. Why? Cause it's, it's interesting. You brought up like the, kind of the posture and the stature. Cause when you're a kid and you're 13 and you weigh 138 pounds or whatever, you see someone that's like, 190 pounds and they kind of look like, like you said, that's kind of what I think I should be doing, even though it's an interesting thing. I heard, I heard, I think it was either Rollins or Ian McKay, McKay, and they were talking about seeing H R from the Bad Brains and H R

• 33:47Jocko Willink?

  from the Bad Brains was like older, you know, because they were around in the, in the late seventies, but he had been an athlete, H R from the Bad Brains had been an athlete in like high school. He was like a, a track athlete. That's how come he could do these flips, but they like looked at him and he looked like a man, like a jacked guy and they're like, yes. And so that again, you see these, it's an interesting thing, that little physical stature means something apparently.

• 34:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, these, I guess, you know, the psychologists, we have to ask Jordan, you know, these masculine archetypes, they, you get a seed going there, you know, it's in, there are a couple of things. One important person that I failed to mention, the guy that sold me my first skateboard, this guy named Gary Hall, and ran the skateboard shop and was an interesting guy because he's very physically strong, plays hockey, but also skateboarded, actually was a professional skateboarder in the kind of late seventies, early eighties. He took early on when he saw me going off the rails, because I used to skateboard with him a lot. He said, listen, your parents are going through a lot. Whatever you do, do not mess your life up by not going to school, not getting a job, doing all these things. So I didn't follow his advice as well

• 34:59Speaker 01

  as I could have, but Gary and I have remained close friends for, God, I can't even count the years now, more than 35 years. Little, little story here. He, he's actually the operations manager for my laboratory at Stanford and he's a very put together guy. If you walk past him on the street, you wouldn't even know he skateboards. But he was very into, you know, for instance, I've never seen a leaf on his front lawn. It's edged perfectly. My laboratory, I'm very proud to say, and thank you, Gary, has passed every single inspection with 100%. Nobody does that. Like they're, they're gonna find something and he makes sure they don't. And, you know, so there were examples of people like that or my therapist, but that.

• 35:41Speaker 01

  That I thought, wow, I would love to be like that person, but I somehow couldn't find the internal organization to do it. You asked about music. One thing that was just terrible about the early 90s about skateboarding, it was the era of little wheels and people wearing really baggy clothes with, you know, bright colors with like fruit salad on the front. And it would be a few years before the Danny Ways and those guys would come in like blasting Slayer and ACDC and jumping over a Great Wall of China and really bringing, it was like, it was almost like we hadn't, everyone, it was like a pre-pubertal phase of skateboarding, which then eventually went through puberty and some incredible stuff happened. So the music at the time that kids in my high school were listening to was also to me was just dreadful. No disrespect to anybody, but I mean, people were like hacky

• 36:24Speaker 01

  sacking and listening to Phish. And they are, you know, sure, the Grateful Dead would play at Frost Amphitheater at Stanford and we'd go over there for other reasons, you know, but it just, Petuli smell and like, none of that stuff resonated for me. And then what happened was I was 14 and Jim Thebow of Deluxe and has great fame and he's a very quiet, humble guy, but he's, he's sort of the secret parent of all skateboarding. You can look him up. He's a very important figure still to this day and a great person. I was up at Spitfire Thunder, place was called Deluxe, little warehouse, and he gave me a

• 37:04Speaker 01

  tape. And it was a band called Crimp Shrine, which is an East Bay punk band. And that led me to the discovery of the great Operation Ivy. And Operation Ivy was featured in the first H Street video, the entire album of like 27 songs and Operation Ivy, Jesse Michaels and Tim Armstrong, which is now of rancid fame and Transplants with Travis Barker, okay, and on and on and on. So when I heard Operation Ivy, Wow. I mean, I can still feel it in my body now. Just the, I'm not gonna try and sing it, but Jesse was like, you know, I got, it was just so, the energy was so much like, that's me. That, that, that's me. It's like seeing someone on the street that looks just like

• 37:46Speaker 01

  you, and it's a feeling inside you that's me. And then Operation Ivy, I went to Jim and I said, where, where can I get more of this? And he goes, well, if you like that, stiff little fingers. And I was like, stiff little fingers.

• 37:58Jocko Willink?

  Unfortunately, Operation Ivy, one album.

• 38:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, so that they had that energy EP that was really long. Yeah, they broke up because they were a bunch of teenagers touring and they had this huge success. Now fortunately, that led to the great, I mean, my favorite band of all time and tremendous respect and love and admiration and appreciation for Rancid. So if you were, in my mind, if you were going to design a punk band, or a band of any kind, you'd have a bullet belted Mohawk guy up front, that's Tim with a lip, and like, he actually is missing a little bit of that front tooth. And then you'd have an amazing bass player like Matt Freeman, who's like a big, you know, car, car guy. And then you'd have a drummer like Brett Reed, who actually used to skateboard with us at the Embarcadero. I remember thinking like, no one had tattoos

• 38:45Speaker 01

  back then. It was what we call the autoclave days. Now they use disposable needles. Back then it was actually dangerous because you weren't sure if they actually ran the autoclave, or if they were sober while they did it. And he had a huge spider tattoo on his chest. And we're like, whoa, that's a commitment. And, um, and then you'd have Lars Fredrikson, an Oi guy, right? From the South Bay, from San Jose. And I remember the first time I heard Rancid, which was first a three-piece, and then when they added Lars. And I thought, this is like, Operation Ivy graduated and went to college, which none of those guys did. They, they get what I'm talking about, but just so much energy. Like, the albums would open with, and once again, I thought, and I was maturing, right? I'd gone through, I was going through puberty, and I thought, this.

• 39:29Speaker 01

  This is, this is it. And actually, I have to say that throughout my entire life, every Rancid album has tracked to a particular five-year phase of my life. And I could go on and on about this and I will, but I own every beat track, every outtake. I mean, I've even got a song by Rancid called "The Sentence," which nobody knows, which is queued up in my phone so that if I'm on a plane, it starts to go down. As much as I love the people in my life, I'm plugging in and I'm going down, listening to "The Sentence." So that was all during those years. And, and then the fitness thing really took off because of this, I got a football coach, Bob Peters, and then because my girlfriend at the time, she was a year older, she had dated a guy that someone showed me a picture of, and he was this big

• 40:10Speaker 01

  football player from the other high school. And I was, you know, six foot tall at that time, 150 pounds. I, oh my goodness, like, she must think I'm a dental floss, right? So I started doing my sit-ups and my push-ups, and then I started lifting cans of soup, like, classic thing. And then I saw an ad from Mike Mensah in a magazine, and I paid, I, I was working at the time, so I started working at a cafe, you know, bussing tables and things like that. And I got a program from Mike Mensah and got on the phone with him, and he said, "Listen..." You got on the phone with Mike? Well, I paid him, yeah. Oh, okay. I paid him, and he explained high-intensity training and bringing muscles to failure. And so I started doing this thing of training once every... How much did that cost? It's probably about a hundred bucks at the time. That's crazy.

• 40:55Speaker 01

  Would've been a huge investment. You got on the phone with Mike Mensah? Huge investment for me. How many people did he do that for? Well, it was his business. That doesn't even seem scalable, right? I remember I had to go get a, I had to go to Western Union and send him Western Union. That's nuts. It was great. And my mother, I remember when he called, she's like, "Why is this grown man calling you?" And I started doing the, you know, once every, train, rest two days, train, rest two days. And my body just responded like crazy to that. So I was eating and training and just growing like a weed. And, and as most people know, when you're untrained and you start training even a slight, you know, training hard, you just grow. And when you're how old? I was, so that was 17, 19. Your body's just seething with testosterone. Yeah. And HGH or whatever. Everything. I mean, from, and...

• 41:41Speaker 01

  From the sixteen until I guess when I started, I eventually followed that high school girlfriend off to college. I went from a hundred and fifty pounds to two, two fifteen in a period of about, you know, three, three years or so. It wasn't all solid, but it was solid enough. I still had the baby fat, the round, roundish face, but, um, and I was sprinting and lifting. And then basically.

• 42:04Jocko Willink?

  And are you now back in school? Are you paying attention in school?

• 42:08Speaker 01

  So here, here's the irony.

• 42:11Speaker 01

  Uh, I got a girlfriend. I dyed my hair back to a normal color. I started wearing flannels instead of the skateboard gear.

• 42:20Jocko Willink?

  Oh, wait, you dressed like a skateboarder in the, in the nineties, like you were wearing those big jeans and stuff?

• 42:25Speaker 01

  There are photos of those out there. There are a few videos. I know, I, I didn't wear the super baggy stuff. I, I got out before that.

• 42:32Jocko Willink?

  You were danger close though.

• 42:33Speaker 01

  I was danger, I was danger close. It's true. Very embarrassing garb, which is coming back now.

• 42:40Jocko Willink?

  Like for me in, like, I guess I was a generation before that, right? Cause I guess I'm five years old or six years older than you. So like when I got Thrasher magazine, it was like nothing but like hardcore and metal. And matter of fact, my name, with, with my subscription to Thrasher magazine, for whatever reason, the way I wrote my name when I mailed in the thing, they sent it to Volko Willink. The way I wrote it, so they were, you know, somewhere they got files on me at Thrasher magazine. They used to send the magazine to Volko Willink, but they would know, it was like hardcore and that was it, man. It was, it was total rebellion. It was absolute rebellion and that's the way and.

• 43:24Speaker 01

  That's where you discovered music.

• 43:25Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's where I got, that's where I picked up a lot of music and started seeing that and having that attitude. And that rebellious attitude has suited me very well for my whole life. Um, most, most of the time it's worked out all right. Sometimes been a little bit much, but, but yeah, then, then, so I joined the Navy. And that's when, you know, unfortunately for you, you got roped into big baggy pants. Stuff, right?

• 43:49Speaker 01

  There was, it was pretty bad. The, um, yeah. Well, and I stopped skateboarding and started working out and I got into Muay Thai.

• 43:57Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 43:57Speaker 01

  I started actually opening the doors on this Muay Thai place so they let me train there for free. It was in San Jose. I think it still exists, the Muay Thai Academy. And it was interesting. There were a lot of cops that trained there and bodyguard training. They had some weapons training. So now I'm hanging around with a different group of guys. Still liked fighting, still had a lot of aggression, but I was, I wasn't skateboarding. I was hanging out with my girlfriend.

• 44:20Jocko Willink?

  Do you ever get your ass beat in these fights?

• 44:22Speaker 01

  Um, yeah, I'm lucky that over the years I've never been knocked down or knocked out, but I've definitely taken hits. And, um, you know, there's that, I always say the amazing thing about adrenaline is that when you get in a fight, it's amazing how little it hurts during the fight and how much it hurts afterward. Um, so definitely experience the clarity of getting hit and feeling ultra clear. And again, I don't recommend it to people, especially as you've pointed out many times on your podcast, and I appreciate that you do this, you know, you can hit someone just right and it's all fair and square and they can, you know, pull out a gun, kill you or the person next to you and, or, and this, I'll tell a story that, uh, that unfortunately happened, you know, when I went off, basically I went off to college because the girlfriend went to college.

• 45:05Speaker 01

  Um, she went to UC Santa Barbara and I was going down there my senior year, literally sleeping in my car in the parking lot. She was my family.

• 45:11Jocko Willink?

  Wait, so your senior year of high school?

• 45:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:13Jocko Willink?

  She's already in college?

• 45:14Speaker 01

  You know, so what happened was she was a year ahead of me. So my junior year, I started hanging out with her. You asked if I was going to school. I was going, I was dressing the part more of a normal person, but unfortunately I was still really challenged in school. I didn't have the skills. I hadn't barely, I'd barely gone in the early years. So I was reading and I was smart enough to kind of get by, but I wasn't doing very well. And I thought, what am I going to do with myself? And she's going to college soon, I'm sure. And I decided to take fire science classes down at Michigan College, become a firefighter. I like hanging out with a bunch of dudes and lifting weights and I love the camaraderie and I want to make a living. And, um, you know, she's the one drives the Bronco. I don't even have a car. How am I going to get a car or a truck? You know, I mean, how am I going to live?

• 45:56Speaker 01

  And so I started thinking about my future a bit, but that was as far as I was thinking out. Then I somehow managed to graduate. Don't ask me how. And I, and she went off to college. And so in that year where she was a year ahead of me and I was a senior, I was going down to Santa Barbara to visit her quite a lot. Sleeping in the parking lot, getting into mischief of various kinds, but basically just wanted to be as close to her as I could. And then I decided I would apply to college. And the reason was, there was a counselor at mission who said, well, you know, you can go into the fire service without a college degree, but if you have a college degree, there are some opportunities that open up for you in there that you wouldn't have otherwise. So I was still in therapy, talked to my therapist, he said, I think it'd be a good idea. You seem

• 46:37Speaker 01

  to have a mind that wants to consume a lot of knowledge. So I took the SAT and by some stroke of luck, I, you know, I broke a thousand, which, you know, for Gunn High School would be considered like the low end because everyone there is like, you know, perfect. This is the only score that is, it was acceptable. And then there was me, you know, and I wrote my college entrance essay saying that I'd like to run a station house someday and become a firefighter. And I told a little bit of my story. It wasn't a sob story or this and that, you know, I just told my story and I got in. So I go to UC Santa Barbara. She's now living off campus. I'm staying with her. I think I had her bed in the dorms. I show up with- Wait, you got into UC Santa Barbara? I did. Okay, sweet. Yeah, which at the time, I think the standards for getting in were, were lower than they

• 47:21Speaker 01

  are now. It's super competitive, all UCs now, but got in and it was a total disaster. Getting in fights. I got the lifting weights part down. I would go for runs. I was training at Muay Thai gym downtown, found someone who would hold bags for me and would spar with me a little bit. Even made some money teaching some self-defense classes on campus and things like that, you know, and the girlfriend and I are now starting to fracture, mostly because I was like, wow, there are a lot of other attractive women here. And not good. I will say this, guys, if there's a woman who is really beautiful, dedicated, sweet and kind, and it's early, it is worth investing in those early relationships and going through some developmental milestones together. If you think you have to break up just to explore,

• 48:06Speaker 01

  think twice. Talk to me first because she would have been a great choice, but I was distracted. And then I started, I got thrown out of the dorms for fighting. I had a guy- You're not, you don't drink still? I drank a little bit the first year and then, you know, I, not so much. For me, it was, I've never really needed to drink. So if I go out, listen to music, I was still going to punk rock shows, always, always, always.

• 48:31Speaker 01

  And I'd go to parties and you know, it was fun, you know, people were drinking and having a good time, but I wasn't really into drinking and I could say whatever I wanted to say without it. I think I just always had that kind of wild side in me that I didn't need to drink in order to-

• 48:46Jocko Willink?

  But you're still getting in fights even though you're not drinking because drinking leads to a lot of fighting.

• 48:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I don't have that excuse. The, yeah, guy pulled the fire alarm in our building because he was done with finals and he was celebrating. I remember wake, jumping out of bed because I needed my sleep because you grow when you sleep, right? Running out there and grabbing him and hitting him, those kinds of, that kind of stupidity. He stuck a key through my cheek. It was actually this cheek. I remember thinking someone said, "You have blood on your face." I said, "He's got his blood on my face?" And they're like, "No, you're bleeding." This kind of thing, just young stupidity, 19 years old or 18 years old. And then what happened was that summer she moved home and I decided to stay in that little town of Isla Vista and I didn't pay rent. I just skateboarded. Just, none of these

• 49:32Speaker 01

  houses are locked. Just stay in one. So I was staying in one. I was delivering bagels for the Bagel Cafe, driving the old truck and 4:30 in the morning, come home, sleep, get up and go find a barbecue and, and hang out, skateboard, do whatever, work out. And it was 4th of July, 1994, I remember this very well. And we went to go, the store to pick up some steaks. We were driving back and there were some guys coming out of the house with a bunch of stuff, surfboards, skateboards. And one of the guys in our car said the usual thing. He said, "Oh, let's get them. Let's beat them up." And I was like, "No, no, no, that's not how you do it, right? If you just say, 'I'm gonna beat you up,' this is like bad tactics, right? Here, I'm talking to you guys about fighting. This is amusing." Also, this is the first podcast I've ever been in, except the one with Joe Ring where I'm the smallest person in the room. Joe's a big guy, as you know,

• 50:16Speaker 01

  he's thick. So, so what ended up happening is there was a big fight between a bunch of guys and us and the whole thing. And it was like knives and bottles and it, it worked out in the sense that no one got cut or killed. Police showed up and I'll never forget this. The cop came up to me and he said, "A big crowd had assembled and people were..." And I'd done-

• 50:37Jocko Willink?

  Wait, were these guys, when they were walking, were they, were they jacking stuff?

• 50:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, they were stealing-

• 50:41Jocko Willink?

  Okay, so they were stealing stuff?

• 50:41Speaker 01

  They were stealing stuff. And, you know, and I hit a guy and the whole thing and like, and I ended up on my feet and then there was a huge crowd and a couple of guys I was with ran away. It was like, "Let's get them." But then when they come out with bottles and knives, it's like- Out of town and so, um, police showed up and I'll never forget this. The cops said, um, good job. And I remember feeling just the worst sunken feeling in my stomach. I thought like, good job. I mean, first, I just, it all kind of fell into place. It's like, I'm nineteen, girlfriend's gone. I don't have a job. I'm not doing well in school. I'm getting, I'd actually been thrown out of the dorms for fighting. Um, and some other just stupidity. And, you know, I'm getting in fights.

• 51:25Speaker 01

  I could have cut someone and someone could have cut me. I could be, I could be dead or in jail. It could be like one of the, the, the stories from Embarcadero of the guys that didn't make it. That didn't skateboard. They just hung out drinking and partying and fighting all day. Right? And I remember going back to my place that night and thinking, this is it. Like this is the line. I, I need to do something. I'm basically a loser. And I was, I was a total loser. Um, and I thought, what am I gonna do? Well, I had gotten C minuses and Ds in all my classes up until then at Santa Barbara. Barely finished high school. And so I decided to take a leave of absence. I did not drop out. I took a leave of absence. I moved home. And I went to Foothill College, community college. And I didn't talk to any of my old friends from the skateboarding world.

• 52:08Speaker 01

  It was just too familiar with a bunch of things. I didn't talk to my family. I lived in a little apartment and I just started studying. I thought, what am I good at? Okay. I can remember things pretty well. I like to read. This is it. And I remember thinking, my dad's an academic. So I thought, you know, I'm not gonna do this. That'll just validate, you know, what he does and his choices. And I thought, well, that's stupid. Right? So I started working and I did okay in my courses. Took art history, took biology, took psychology. Then I went back to Santa Barbara and I had this reputation in Santa Barbara at that time as a guy that was fun to have at parties.

• 52:46Speaker 01

  Cause something fun was gonna happen, you know, something wild was gonna happen or there'd be a big fight. You know, you're the guy getting nosed up to the front to take the damage or do the damage. Um, for entertain, other people's entertainment. So I went back and I lived in the Studio Plaza apartments. I still have a photo of that door. Cause it has great meaning for me. I lived in the corner there. I lifted weights. I studied like a maniac. And I did not drink or party, except once a month, I'd allow myself to go out and. And I would really, you know, I would just stay out all night partying, but over time, what I realized is I didn't like it because then it made the rest of the week that much harder. So in those years, I discovered a guy, an amazing person, his name was Harry Carlyle,

• 53:29Speaker 01

  former Navy guy, incidentally, ran a laboratory and taught classes and he was teaching about, at the time, there was no neuroscience. He was teaching about psychology and biology, they called it biopsychology, and about how depression was based on these things called neurotransmitters and schizophrenia, which I'd seen some of in this, you know, in my years.

• 53:49Jocko Willink?

  Wait, neuroscience didn't exist at this time?

• 53:52Speaker 01

  There was no field of neuroscience. There was neurochemistry, physiology, but so this is the mid 90s now. 94, 95 or so. And he was teaching about the brain and how it works and then he was talking about thermal regulation and he was talking about why people die at raves. He said, "I heard of these things called raves and the people taking this drug," and he'd break down the structure of MDMA, ecstasy, and explain how it would disrupt the hypothalamus and one's perception of how hot it was, and this is why people would overheat even if they were pouring water on themselves. As a little scientific factoid, when you're overheating in the desert or while training, you might think, "Oh, put a cold towel over my head or the back of my neck." Well, that's like putting a cold towel on a thermostat because you have a thermostat in your brain. What happens when you put a cold towel on the thermostat? The thermostat turns on the heat.

• 54:36Speaker 01

  That's how you overheat and die. Turns out the best way to dump heat is through the palms of your hands and the bottoms of your feet. You have a special venous portals called AVAs where you can dump heat. So if you want to cool off fast, in fact, you can save your life by getting the bottoms of your bare feet or the palms of your hands into cool water. We can talk about how this can be leveraged for training because there's some amazing research on this. So I was learning about thermal regulation and I was learning about drugs of abuse and why some of my friends were addicts, probably, was these pathways related to dopamine and et cetera, et cetera. I thought... Well, who is this guy? So I started talking to him and he drove a black truck and he was in shape and I thought, I want to be like this guy. And so I started hanging around his lab and

• 55:19Speaker 01

  he would drink black coffee and he let me listen to whatever music I wanted after hours. And we started doing experiments. I started working in a laboratory and he pulled me aside at one point and he said, you know, you seem to have some proficiency for this. You know, if you go to graduate school, they'll pay you. And I thought, they pay you to do this? And he said, yeah, they'll pay you to do it. He didn't tell me how much they pay you. But basically what happened was, to make a long story short, no more fighting, was never into the drugs or alcohol, as I mentioned, did not get back together with the girlfriend, but I went from a CD student to a straight A student. I got a B plus my senior year and it still pisses me off. But that was in neuroanatomy, which is now what I teach to medical students. It became my favorite topic. I went on to take multiple courses and that's

• 56:02Speaker 01

  always that one thing that didn't quite get you. I think Dan Gable talks about this in wrestling. It's the one guy that I think in his words, gum beat out and then pin him or beat him by points. It's that one guy that teaches you the most. Right? So I became a straight A student, went on to, you know, graduate with honors, went to graduate school first at Berkeley and then did my PhD and then my postdoc at Stanford and so on and so forth. I will say, over the years, I kept in touch with various people in the skateboard community. And then when I was a postdoc, which is kind of like a residency between your PhD and professorship, I was at Stanford and I was working extremely hard. I've always had a capacity to, to work long hours. Actually, I have a, I hope the insurance companies don't mind me saying this, but it would only hurt me. I have a mutation in a, an adrenal related

• 56:46Speaker 01

  gene. So I probably make a little bit, I probably have the capacity to make a little bit more adrenaline than most. I can get by on very little sleep, at least for a couple nights. I'm guessing a lot of teen guys might have this. It's a pretty common mutation. About 12% of males have it. So I can do fine with one night, no sleep. Second night, I'm kind of falling apart a bit. But if I need to take a one hour nap and bounce right back in, I'm good. I don't recommend it. I try and get my good sleep now. But, so I was just work, work, work, lift, lift, lift, run, run, run. Just repeat.

• 57:15Jocko Willink?

  So you, so you graduate from, from Santa Barbara?

• 57:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right.

• 57:19Jocko Willink?

  And then you go from there to Berkeley?

• 57:21Speaker 01

  I go to Berkeley and the first week at Berkeley, Rance is playing at the Greek Theater.

• 57:24Jocko Willink?

  Oh, hell yeah.

• 57:25Speaker 01

  So I'm there and I'm still doing that. I'm still in it, but I'm not, but I'm the guy now on the, you know, sidelines. Just happy to be there. And, and then eventually I did my PhD, my graduate advisor moved, so I went up to Davis. And I worked for an incredible woman up there who is just a really, really good scientist. She was just extremely rigorous. Gave me a lab and some keys to the lab, showed me where things were and said, listen, I'm gonna have a couple of kids in the next few years. And the best thing I can do for you is to be available when you need me, but figure it out. Don't burn the lab down, don't kill yourself, go for it. And so it was like, you kidding me? This is, there was no one else in there. I thought, and this was perfect. Tinfoil on the windows, lock the doors, rancid blasting all day. Ignore the knocks on the door and just do experiments, experiments, experiments.

• 58:10Speaker 01

  We published ten papers together.

• 58:12Jocko Willink?

  What kind of experiments?

• 58:14Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 58:14Jocko Willink?

  So give me an example.

• 58:15Speaker 01

  So at the time.

• 58:16Jocko Willink?

  I'm thinking like eighth grade. I was putting like hydrogen peroxide, something, whatever.

• 58:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, a little disclaimer. Now my laboratory mainly focuses on humans, but at the time we were using animal models. So at the time, and listen, I have mixed feelings about this. But at the time we were doing experiments on carnivores, including cats and ferrets. Because they have a visual system that's very immature. So we were studying neuroplasticity, which is the brain's ability to change in response to experience. Really trying to define fundamental principles that do carry over to humans. And we were, I was also, there's a primate center at Davis where it's doing work on non-human primates, macaque monkeys. Big, dangerous monkeys that you wouldn't want to be left alone with. But I was working, trying to understand embryonic development, so working on fetal macaques. So getting to do surgeries on fetal macaques and I loved it. I loved working with my hands.

• 59:03Speaker 01

  I also discovered something in science, which is sitting and learning from books is great, but I have a lot of energy and I need to put that someplace. And doing careful dissections for hours and hours was a great way to change. I learned how to take all that energy that normally would go into big movements and just channel it into total focus. I could spend eight hours down the microscope, just doing dissections and listening to music and doing dissections. In fact, I used to play this game where I'd try and get as ramped up and alert as possible by listening to music and drinking coffee. And then just do my dissections as slowly as possible. I was just all this crazy stuff. And in those years, I was still going to shows. There was a place up in Sacramento, rough place. And I started going to see Roger Morey in the disasters play.

• 59:48Speaker 01

  And you know, as you know, he's agnostic front, Rod, it's only fair to call him the great Roger Morey. I'd go to these shows where I was legitimately afraid. You know, I'm like, at that point, last thing I want to do is get into a fight. I'm just legitimately afraid of what's gonna happen. Um, this was at a place called The Boardwalk, and there was a place up on Broadway, the Colonial Theater, and they would do Mexican wrestling one night with the hands dipped in glass. And then they would do punk rock shows. I got to see the Transplants, which is Tim Armstrong, Travis Barker, and bands like that play in a little tiny theater. And I thought, life is so good. I'm working on my PhD, we're publishing papers, I still have arms in this world, although I didn't know any of the characters. And then eventually I graduated.

• 1:00:32Speaker 01

  I got my PhD and went and did a postdoc at Stanford. And that was a problem. I was back in the early location. There's this thing in neuroscience called conditioned place preference, where if something really good happens for you someplace, you really like it. And good, and your body goes into a great state when you're there. There's also conditioned place aversion. And here I am back in Palo Alto and thinking, gosh, like, this was a kind of a dark place for me. Forget the well-trimmed lawns and everything. This place is not, I'm starting to get depressed. So I moved to San Francisco. And one day I got this idea. I thought, wait a second, Thrasher's right over the hill. Why aren't I there? So I have a friend that was at a sibling magazine to Thrasher, which is Slap Magazine.

• 1:01:14Speaker 01

  It's now closed up, but I got a name, Mark Whitley, that I grew up with, who now works for Apple. Called up Mark and said, hey, you know what, can I do some work for you guys? He said, sure. Said, do you know how to take photos? And I said, sure. That's not true, but I said, I know how to take a photo.

• 1:01:29Jocko Willink?

  Of course you do.

• 1:01:30Speaker 01

  So he said, well, you can always do music stuff. So I started going to shows and taking pictures and doing write-ups and traveling a little bit for that, for some extra cash.

• 1:01:39Jocko Willink?

  What year is this?

• 1:01:41Speaker 01

  2005 to 2010. So, so there's some publications in Thrasher. People can, you might be able to find them. My own, so I covered Murray and the disasters, Bouncing Souls, love those guys.

• 1:01:51Jocko Willink?

  I remember when Roger Murray went to jail in the, I don't forget what year it was, but I remember going to, they would have like benefit shows to raise money to. I don't know, to break him out on what we were doing. I was down for the cause, so I can tell you that much.

• 1:02:05Speaker 01

  Well, the thing about Rogers that's really interesting, and I don't even know if he'd remember who I was. I became friendly with, I think it was his bass player, Reese. There's, um, who's for the disasters, great band, by the way. I loved the band, like the Janie Hawk song, and some of those are just amazing songs. And I remember, um, Seeing Murray when I was a kid and his neck was like, I used to have a bulldog mastiff a few years ago, Costilla, and Costilla never lifted weights, right? But Roger's neck is huge, right? And this is a guy that probably didn't lift weights, it's just huge because he's just born that way. And think, you know, it's like you guys are big dudes. It's like there's certain people that you know, wrists are thick, neck is big, and I've been letting Murray and like Murray could sing Happy Birthday and it would be

• 1:02:50Speaker 01

  like, you know, it's just, his voice, it just comes from so deep inside his body. It's just, it's just beautiful and amazing to see what he can do and the physicality of it. And so I did a thing for Thrasher on Murray and the disaster, did some transplant stuff, Bouncing Souls, was going to shows, getting 500 to 1,000 bucks per article, which at the time as a postdoc felt pretty good. Because I, you know, life was expensive and when you're a postdoc or graduate student, you're not making much money at all.

• 1:03:18Jocko Willink?

  And this is because at this time, you're also at Stanford, you said.

• 1:03:21Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:03:22Jocko Willink?

  Doing what?

• 1:03:23Speaker 01

  It's a postdoc, so when you finish your PhD, you typically do five years where it's just pure research before you go get, hopefully get a professorship. So I would go to shows, stay up most of the night, then come back to Stanford, sleep under my bench, wake up and start doing experiments and shower at the gym. And so, and this is the thing, you know, those old habits die hard. You said a lot of those, as you mentioned, a lot of those early years, the decision-making and the habits carry over and fortunately I was able to, to move the, the good ones forward, the good habits, that is. So when I was a PhD student, I thought, why pay rent? There's a building here with a shower. It was a cage wash shower for the monkeys, but they never used it. So I would shower in there or at the gym, I'd brush my teeth in the sink and I'd, I'd

• 1:04:08Speaker 01

  sleep there. I did that also as a postdoc and I confess even, eventually what happened was I finished my postdoc, I was hired as a, what they call pre-tenure professor, assistant professor at UC San Diego. I got a house, because at the time when houses down here were, it was in normal heights and it was relatively inexpensive. So went from no responsibility, no property, no nothing, I had a house, a bulldog and a laboratory of my own.

• 1:04:32Jocko Willink?

  And this was at UC San Diego?

• 1:04:34Speaker 01

  UC San Diego, so this would be 2011 and I thought, well. The commute from Normal Heights to UC San Diego is pretty far, so I just put a couch in my office. The dog was fine. There's a field outside where I can take him out. And so I would sleep in lab two nights a week. And then eventually, and I did well there, my lab, I'm proud to say, and the credit really goes to the people, very hardworking, published good papers, had grants, and my career really took off in neuroscience. And then eventually I was recruited back to Stanford as a tenured professor, which is where I've been now for about seven years. And even then, when I got back, I thought, well, why, the housing in the Bay Area is crazy. I looked at Costello, my bulldog, I was like, how come we moved back into the lab? So I stayed

• 1:05:17Speaker 01

  there until someone finally came along and said, this sends the wrong message. I said, well, it actually sends the message that there should be better housing for faculty. But I saved some money that way, so that I was able to eventually buy a small home. So over the years, it's been consistently the same themes. Work hard, train, keep out of any kind of mischief, which is easy to do now. I value so many things in my life, I wouldn't want to do that. But, and then just try and bring the spirit of skateboarding and punk rock music to the whole thing of science. And then the piece of that where it kind of wraps around is that a few years ago, I decided I'd write a book, but then I decided I didn't want to write a book. And so I started going on podcasts, Joe and

• 1:06:02Speaker 01

  Ferris and the others. And, you know, there was this guy, Lex Friedman, of course, and he said, maybe we should start a podcast. So I started the podcast. And when I did it, I looked to a couple of communities. I thought, who can just put things together really well, that really understand aesthetics and the DIY, you know, do it yourself kind of mantra and get it right. And so I looked to a guy named Rob Moore, who produces the Fight podcast with Teddy Atlas, and who comes from the world of PR, but also knows a lot about the Fight world. And I went to Mike Blayback, who's a famous skateboard photographer, took the pictures of Danny Way jumping the Great Wall of China, DC Shoes, Nike skateboarding, and Mike just

• 1:06:43Speaker 01

  knows how to do the kind of photographs that I like, which are black and white and very, you know, look, there's a, there's a common theme. And so that's the, the podcast. And, um, you know, people always ask, why do you always wear a black shirt? And, you know, I've been wearing a black shirt to work for 25 years. This isn't a costume for the podcast. I've just always dressed this way, done it this way. And the wonderful thing about social media is you get in touch with people like you. Um, and I should say, for me, it's a real honor to be here because when I 2015, 2016, um, I was living with my girlfriend at the time, we'd met in San Diego, um, my ex-girlfriend now, but we're on good terms. I can tell this story. And there was a kind of weird Navy SEAL theme in our household because the guy she'd been with before was a team guy.

• 1:07:28Speaker 01

  Uh oh. Right. And so it was like, I'm back in high school again, you know, this guy's, I won't say who it is, but he seems like a really nice guy, but team guy, and she was doing CrossFit with a bunch of team guys and stuff. And here I am like the dweeby scientist, you know, I lift weights and do all that. But, you know, our first part, her first party or gathering where all these guys come over, I'm like, once again, I'm the smallest person in the room. I'm a scientist. I'm used to being the biggest guy in the room, smallest guy in the room, real good guys, as you, as you all are. Um, but what ended up happening was, uh, I was an avid Tim Ferriss podcast listener, and I remember looking at the picture and it was your, your grill looking at me. And I showed her and I said, uh, I said, this guy, it was just on Tim Ferriss. And she goes, well, if you were

• 1:08:11Speaker 01

  going to draw a team guy, that's the guy you draw. And I thought, well, there's a lot behind that statement. Let's not, I'm not going to ask why. Um, so in any case, uh, I loved that podcast. And it was, you know, when I lived here in San Diego, I was involved a little bit in fitness and martial arts at a real superficial level. And you guys would come in and, um, you know, beat everybody up and, uh, and then go, go off laughing and smiling and, uh, leave the rest of us mere mortals to think about what just happened. No, just kidding. Basically what you guys would do would come in and take over bars. Well, that's. Yeah. Um, and, uh, and so I learned which bars not to drink at, not because I was going to get into any mischief with anybody I know, you know, but because, um, you know,

• 1:08:52Speaker 01

  there are only, uh, some, how do I say this correctly? It's a, it's a, uh, resource allocation issue. So, so anyway, I've been running my lab for a long time now. The podcast is a newer thing. We've had about a year and a half, but the themes of skateboarding, punk rock music, they are not just part of it. They're, I think this will make sense to you guys is it, they're, they're in me, right? That they're, they're wired into my nervous system. And I'm, uh, feel really honored that to be here and also that the skateboard community has kind of, uh, re-embraced me with open arms and in touch with a lot of those guys. Tony Hawk, Danny Way, Mike Blayback, and there's so many names and, and people and, it's an amazing community because skateboarding and punk rock music, I don't know about other

• 1:09:36Speaker 01

  things because that's only what I know, but odd, but really special communities because you can be nine years old and hanging out with people that are in their 30s. And so you can learn a lot for better or for worse, but it's also a community that especially more and more is really starting to, they take care of each other in a way that I think is probably not present in other communities. It can be harsh too. I mean, if you screw up, they're gonna let everybody know. So maybe some parallels with the teams. Yeah.

• 1:10:07Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Uh, so that kind of brings us through your sort of educational system and what you've been learning along the way. And, um, I, I would, I want to grab some of that knowledge, you know, of, of what you've learned about, you know, how to be better, how to be smarter, how to be stronger, how to be faster, how to be more healthy. Um, cause all those things are things that, you know, I, I've been trying to do my whole life as well. And, uh, obviously not done it on a academic level, but really through trial and error and, and also being surrounded by a bunch of people that were always, you know, had that, had that same kind of mindset. We were very lucky in the SEAL teams. We

• 1:10:48Jocko Willink?

  had guys that would go way down the rabbit hole on some random form of exercise or some random diet or what, some random thing that it would get spread. And, and then we really, I would say around maybe 2005, 2006, we started really bringing in professionals. Actually it was earlier than that. We'd always bring in professionals, but so we'd bring in professionals. That were really good at their designated field. So I feel like I got very lucky with some of that as well. But obviously, you're you're a living experiment on this stuff. And then you have the academics to back it up. So let's talk about some of this stuff. And I've listened to

• 1:11:28Jocko Willink?

  a bunch of your stuff, like, you know, and and anyone that wants to go deep on this. Trust me, you can go deep, listening to your podcast. I mean, you can go real deep.

• 1:11:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, I always say if nothing else will cure insomnia. Because you listen to it, you might not nod out. But yeah, we do go to detail. I've had the great fortune of of working with some units in special operations doing talking about physiology and using physiology. Yeah, these are tools that over the years I've used. But most of what we cover on the podcast and what we can talk about now are things that come from other laboratories. This is one thing I truly enjoy is talking about my own work and research. But a lot of what has been wonderful for me is bringing on expert guests and connecting with people who are experts, say, in thermal regulation, something is, I mean, the ability to adjust one's temperature through some dedicated actions,

• 1:12:20Speaker 01

  is the difference between being able to do more work or no more work physically and mentally, we can talk about that. But in terms of things that really enhance performance, we can talk about the what I there are two ways to think about biology. One are modulators, and the others are mediators. So there are some things that you can do that will strongly modulate your ability to do lots of other things. Let's just give an example. If I sleep deprive Echo for two days, his ability to focus is going to be diminished, relative to what it would be if he had slept well for for for two nights. Why? Well, sleep and its various outputs modulate attention, but it doesn't mediate to tension. You can't really use sleep in in real time to

• 1:13:05Speaker 01

  enhance attention. Okay, a fire alarm will modulate my attention, but it doesn't mediate it. So we can talk about modulators and mediators. And the important thing to understand is that there are certain foundational behaviors, do's and don'ts, that set the stage for you to be better at everything. So a lot of times, people will say, how can I lift more focus better, remember things better, say, well, let's think about the foundation of that. And that's always going to come back to two elements. And that's sleep and what I call non sleep deep rest. So sleep is the fundamental. Practice or part of our 24 hour cycle where if you don't get it on a consistent basis, you are down regulating your ability to do everything, right?

• 1:13:50Speaker 01

  Metabolism is screwed up, immune system is screwed up, et cetera, et cetera. However, it is not the case if you get a one night's bad sleep, or that if you're not sleeping perfectly, that you can't perform well. But let's talk about sleep and just because I think it's important. The goal for most people, unless you're pulling vampire shifts on on deployment, or you're a shift worker, and thank you, shift workers, we'll talk about shift work. You should try and get really good sleep 80% of the time, 80% of the nights of your life. The other 20%, I hope you're not getting good sleep for good reasons that you enjoy. But the point is that there are a couple of things that you can do. First of all, every cell in your body has a circadian rhythm, meaning every cell has a 24 hour circadian clock that's regulated by genes. Think of these, your body as a bunch of millions of clocks and need to align those clocks to a single time.

• 1:14:34Speaker 01

  This is why when you travel overseas, your gut goes off or it's more easy, more easily you get sick, or your thinking isn't quite right. That the clocks aren't in alignment, they're not entrained, as we say. Number one practice for everything, sleep especially, is try and get some natural light in your eyes within an hour of waking up. If you wake up before the sun, turn on a bunch of bright lights and then get sunlight in your eyes once it comes out. If there's dense cloud cover, there are still more photons, light energy coming through that cloud cover than there are coming from artificial lights. So try and get five to 10 minutes without sunglasses outside in the morning. Once the sun is out, most days, if not all days. This has an outsized effect on a number of things. First of all, it modulates the timing of what's called the cortisol pulse.

• 1:15:19Speaker 01

  Once every 24 hours, you're going to get a boost in cortisol, big spike in cortisol. It's a healthy boost. It sets your temperature rhythm in motion, sets your level of alertness, your level of focus and your mood. You want that cortisol pulse to happen as early in the day as possible.

• 1:15:33Jocko Willink?

  What's triggering the cortisol pulse?

• 1:15:35Speaker 01

  The cortisol pulse is naturally entrained by these genetic programs to happen once every 24 hours, but light will. Anchor it to the period where you see bright light.

• 1:15:44Jocko Willink?

  Got it.

• 1:15:44Speaker 01

  A late shifted cortisol pulse. So imagine the kid that wakes up and spends the morning in bed, or you're spending the morning in bed and you're texting, or you're indoors and you're typing on the computer. That's not enough light to accomplish what I'm talking about. And then you go outside around noon or one, you're in what's called the circadian dead zone, which is the time in which light arriving at the eyes can do certain things, but it can't time this pulse. That means that cortisol pulse is going to come in the afternoon, which means that your temperature rhythm is going to be shifted late. And that's actually a signature of depression and anxiety and difficulty falling asleep. These are from studies done by the great Robert Sapolsky and David Spiegel, my colleagues at Stanford. So you want that increase in cortisol to happen early in the day. Basically, you wake up because your temperature goes up.

• 1:16:29Speaker 01

  So let me ask you this. I have a sense for you. What time do you wake up typically?

• 1:16:34Jocko Willink?

  Generally between, well, between 4:15 and 4:30.

• 1:16:40Speaker 01

  Okay. So for most people, it's gonna be a little bit later, probably. But for you, that means, so you're waking up. If it's because of an alarm, it's because of an alarm. But if that's your natural wake up time now without an alarm, that means that your temperature is starting to rise at that time. That's why you wake up. That temperature increase triggers that cortisol release. Now, and that's why some people wake up right before their alarm clock. It's this cortisol pulse. Okay? And two hours before that, so for you, approximately 2:30 in the morning, is what we call your temperature minimum. It's when your temperature is lowest that it's ever going to be in the 24 hour cycle. If you view light within the four hours after that temperature minimum,

• 1:17:22Speaker 01

  it will tend to wake you up and will keep you entrained to the normal cycle. However, if you were to wake up at 1:30 in the morning and see very bright light, it would delay your circadian clock. It would make it so that the next night you'd want to go to bed later and wake up later. And the way it does that is by changing your core body temperature. So the way it works is you wake up because of an increase in core body temperature. That increase in core body temperature triggers that increase in cortisol. And by viewing light at that time, you entrain, you you ensure that it happens at the same time the next day.

• 1:17:53Jocko Willink?

  Wait, if I woke up at two o'clock in the morning and saw bright light?

• 1:17:57Speaker 01

  That would delay your clock. So what you want, so when you wake up at four thirty in the morning, it's because your clock is in your, the clocks of your body are entrained, they're matched to this cortisol pulse. So viewing bright light in the morning anchors it, when we say entrained, it it tell through a circuit that involves cells in the eye and cells in the hypothalamus, which then talk to the rest of the cells of the body through a signal, a peptide that's released, make sure that the temperature starts rising, goes up, up, up, up, up, and sometime around two or three in the afternoon, you're going to heat, hit your temperature maximum. You might feel a little sleepy at that time, but that's actually the time in which your, your, all your systems are kind of revving at the at the maximum capacity. And then it's going to start to drop and start to drop, drop,

• 1:18:41Speaker 01

  drop. Now that drop in temperature eventually will be a full one to three degrees below

• 1:18:47Speaker 01

  what your temperature maximum. And that's when you're going to get sleepy and fall asleep. This is why it's important to keep the room cool at night to fall asleep. Why keep the room cool? Well, you can always put warm blankets on and put your hand out or your foot out because you actually dump heat through the palms of your hands and the bottoms of your feet. But if you're in a hot room, you'd have to have like an ice bath next to you to put your hand in. That's not feasible.

• 1:19:07Jocko Willink?

  I guess I I live in a luxurious scenario. I can't imagine that there's like, what kind of person is in a situation where they don't see the sun?

• 1:19:17Speaker 01

  Oh, so.

• 1:19:18Jocko Willink?

  That's horrible.

• 1:19:19Speaker 01

  Well.

• 1:19:20Jocko Willink?

  Oh, oh, play my last, being on a submarine. That's horrible. Being on a ship, sometimes you get stuck down below decks. And I remember, this is interesting, I remember I would have like the urge to go out. And go outside like we would, we would, we, you know, being a SEAL platoon on a ship, you don't actually have a job on the ship. You're just kind of riding the ship. So you'd have this urge to go outside and we go outside and PT, we go outside, believe it or not, we go outside and hacky sack. One of my platoon, we played hacky sack. I actually

• 1:19:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, but not listening to fish.

• 1:19:51Jocko Willink?

  We weren't listening to fish, but I'm, I'm, I'm gonna tell you, we played so much hacky sack that I kind of hurt one of my knees. It's gotta get through.

• 1:19:57Speaker 01

  What's that weird inward rotation of the head?

• 1:20:00Jocko Willink?

  But, but we wanted to be outside. I remember having a distinct urge to wanna get outside. So it's really sad if people are in scenarios where they aren't seeing the sun for four hours upon wake up. That's kind of crazy.

• 1:20:13Speaker 01

  Or, or just not getting enough light, period. A lot of people think, for instance, they can get the sunlight through the car windshield or through the window.

• 1:20:19Jocko Willink?

  Oh.

• 1:20:20Speaker 01

  Car windshields and windows have UV filtration.

• 1:20:22Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:23Speaker 01

  Every, blue light has been demonized and we can talk about light later in the evening because you don't want to get too much bright light in your eyes later in the evening if you want to improve sleep. But it does not work as well or as quickly through a window or through a windshield or through sunglasses. Eyeglasses and contacts are fine. If you think about what those do, they actually focus light to the retina. So that's why they're there. They'll help you, even if there's UV protection. Many people are waking up and they're just spending time indoors and they're putting on sunglasses, getting in their car and driving, or there's cloud cover and they think there's no sun out. I don't mean that you actually have to stare at the sun. Never stare at any light so bright, it's gonna damage you. Please don't. And blink as necessary, but the indirect rays from the, from sun, trigger these cells in the eyes called melanopsin ganglion cells. These ganglion cells, these

• 1:21:07Speaker 01

  are, are neurons. They send a signal to your hypothalamus. They also, then the hypothalamus releases this peptide, which is a wake up signal for your whole brain and body and sets a timer for the onset of melatonin release 16 hours later. Melatonin being the hormone that makes you sleepy and makes you want to go to sleep. So you can imagine what happens if you don't get that light until a few hours later. Everything shifted. And then you want to go to, you don't know why you're wide awake at 11:30 or 12 and everything's messed up. The other thing is that you can get bright light from electronic devices early in the day, but it's not enough. You need photons from sunlight. Now, if you live in Scandinavia in the depths of winter, if you're up in like, you know, Trondheim or Ohus or something like, okay, fine.

• 1:21:50Speaker 01

  Don't buy an expensive daytime simulator. Get one of these LED light boxes for drawing. They're very inexpensive in comparison. You find them on Amazon. I don't have a relationship to any of these brands, but they're easy to find, 20, 30 bucks. Put that on your desk and just look at that thing for a few minutes in the morning. Not as good, but better than being in the darkness. Then when the sun's out, get outside. Now, this is a huge, huge effect for the following reason. The signal that arrives from the eyes to the hypothalamus also triggers the release of the neuromodulator dopamine. We hear about dopamine as a feel-good molecule. Dopamine, dopamine, dopamine, dopamine hits. But dopamine's main role in the brain and body is to drive motivation, craving, and pursuit. It is not the molecule

• 1:22:32Speaker 01

  of pleasure. It is the molecule of drive. It is life force. And we'll talk later about how dopamine and testosterone have a close relationship. Dopamine is actually the molecule from which adrenaline, epinephrine, is manufactured. And you may notice, you said, we crave sun. It also does make you feel good. Here's why. If you think about seasonally breeding animals, let's think about the Arctic fox. Well, the Arctic fox in winter is white, but in the summertime has darker pelage. It actually, there's a pathway going from sunlight to dopamine to melanin production in the skin and fur. So animals that transition from light color to dark color, that's all mediated by dopamine. Guess what else happens? The gonads

• 1:23:14Speaker 01

  grow. There are animals that I've worked on in the laboratory and that also in humans, it's now been shown in a beautiful study that people who get 20 to 30 minutes of light on their skin, this was a study done in Israel, so they wear an appropriate amount of clothing, but they're sleeveless, no hat, no sunglasses. They were told to go outside 20 to 30 minutes, three times a week, just in the sunshine. Ideally, they wear shorts also. They measure testosterone and estrogen in men and women. Significant increases in both. And all the associated things of increased passion, blah, blah, blah, blah. That is what they measured in the study. Why? Well, it turns out that light to the eyes, but also light to the skin. The skin is an endocrine organ. It's not just something to tattoo and hang earrings from and put clothing on.

• 1:23:58Speaker 01

  It actually, there's a pathway involving a molecule called P53 in the caratino sites. So these skin cells that when sunlight, when UVB, ultraviolet blue light penetrates the skin, because it can penetrate the skin superficially, triggers these caratino sites to stimulate a pathway that releases dopamine in the brain and body. So you feel better when you're getting light in your eyes and on your skin. And you're increasing testosterone and epinephrine and dopamine increase. That's why you feel good in the summer months. People in Scandinavia know this, this kind of spring fever. In the winter months, you want to go through every bit of effort to double or triple the amount of time that you're spending outside in the morning. So instead of 10 minutes, make it 30 minutes. You can read outside. You can do, you could even be on your phone, but we'll talk about why that might not be optimal.

• 1:24:38Speaker 01

  In addition to that, there's a study done out of China, now tens of thousands of subjects, looking at the incidence of myopia, nearsightedness in kids, but now this is also true in adults. When you look at things up close, the eyeball actually starts to elongate over time. And the image then focuses in front of the neural part of the eye. And things are blurry. That's why they call it nearsighted. It's actually fall, it's not, it's not, farsighted would be the image falls behind. So it's just pure optics, it's falling in front, becoming myopic. Spending time outside and getting UVB exposure during the day can offset, in some cases, reverse myopia. So all these kids who are spending time indoors on screens and, you know, reading on books, but not getting any outdoor time, serious problem. And now adults are doing this too.

• 1:25:22Speaker 01

  The pandemic was, there was also a pandemic of myopia and depression that was simply because people were indoors too much. So get that sunlight early on.

• 1:25:32Jocko Willink?

  They shut down the freaking beaches in San Diego. I mean, it was crazy. Hey, I went to college, I was an English major and there was some, there was one, one semester I took five English classes, five English classes was a dumb move, but whatever. I'm trying to plot out my, my classes so that I could go to jujitsu for like three, four hours a day. So anyways, I ended up taking five classes and so I was reading. Like on the weekends, I would read like eight, 10 hours a day. And yeah, that's when I realized, oh, if you don't stop and take a break, you're like, I'd get done and I'd walk out, you know, walk outside and my, my vision would be blurry.

• 1:26:12Jocko Willink?

  And cause I was just working at that close range for five, six, seven, eight hours. It's horrible.

• 1:26:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, you definitely want to get a horizon view every once in a while. When you look at a horizon, unless you're tracking something on the horizon, you naturally go into panoramic vision. This is a great way to learn how to do panoramic vision. We were talking about before. In an environment like this, where it's, you know, close quarters, I can look at you and then I can dilate my gaze consciously and you don't know I'm doing it. This, as we talked about earlier, it calms the nervous system. The nice thing is it's also covert. You can be doing public speaking, you can be meeting somebody where you're starting to feel a little tense or whatever, and you can dilate your gaze. Or you can learn to, I think it's a great skill to be able to dilate and, um, and contract the aperture of vision. And a horizon will teach you kind of the feeling of having dilated vision. And then you can kind of accomplish that without looking at horizon. So,

• 1:27:04Speaker 01

  yes, if you're looking at things up close, they say for about every 45 minutes of doing that, you want 20 minutes of long distance viewing. That's very hard for most people to get in this kind of work environment. So one thing that works really well to reset the eyes and the nervous system throughout the day is, walks are great and jogs are great. Why? Well, it turns out that self-generated optic flow. So not a Peloton, sorry, won't work. Not a treadmill, sorry. But walking or running or cycling or something where visual images are going by you on all sides while you're in effort. There's some beautiful papers, now five papers, showing that when we are in self-generated optic flow,

• 1:27:44Speaker 01

  the amygdala, a site in the brain that's commonly associated with fear, but it's mainly a site of threat detection and anxiety, is the activity in the amygdala is suppressed. I think about this a lot when I read your book and hear stories from the teams of, you know, this notion of having a forward center of mass. And how it's often harder to stay still, right? I know you guys don't have a retreat button, but it's harder to stay still than it is sometimes to move forward. Forward movement can actually calm us. And so a lot of people there on the precipice of something scary or challenging will retreat or pause, but forward movement actually suppresses the activity of the amygdala. This again has been shown in humans and non-human primates and in small animal models.

• 1:28:26Speaker 01

  And it makes really good sense because forward ambulation, forward movement is incompatible with the fear response in many ways. And so one of the big discoveries in our field of neuroscience the last few years was laboratories not exploring the topic of fear at all. They were actually looking at eye movements and motor movements, found when they did brain-wide imaging that there are these sites in the brain that quiet down when animals or people are moving forward and the fear centers shut down. So if you find yourself afraid, this is, I imagine that, you know, the kid who, I mean, handrails are always dangerous. You can, you can end your, your family lineage with handrails. I've seen people do that. I won't name names, but there was a guy we grew up with who unfortunately, you know,

• 1:29:09Speaker 01

  hopefully he successfully reproduced at some point, but seen some hard stacks on handrails. It's not pretty. But it's always going to be harder to sit up there at the top of the ramp, thinking about dropping in, dropping in.

• 1:29:21Jocko Willink?

  Gotta go.

• 1:29:21Speaker 01

  When I was a kid, Gary Hall, the guy I mentioned earlier, said, I'm gonna, you put your tail down on the deck, I'm in the top of the ramp, that is, I'm gonna skate from one end of the deck to the other, and if I come back the third time and you haven't dropped in, I'm pushing you in. And I saw a lot of kids get pushed in. Now, a dad did that to his kid on YouTube, and I think was punished for child abuse. So nowadays, the rules have changed, but back then you were dropping in because you didn't want to get pushed in. In any case, it's always easier to drop in than stand there and wait, what do I do? What do I do? And that's the suppression of the amygdala. When you go into forward action, the fear centers of the brain shut down.

• 1:29:54Jocko Willink?

  So this is like another little connect in the, of the dots and echoes, because he's heard me talk about this a million times. It's like, hey, when you're waiting to do something, you're gonna be more scared, you're getting built up, you need to step forward, you need to start taking action. Taking action is a way to overcome the feeling of hesitation and fear that you have in your body. So now I have another physiological backup to my instincts. That's good. So, we got up in the morning, we got some light. This is interesting because I, I wake up early in the morning, I work out, but... I go for a run. By the time I'm going for a run, the sun's out.

• 1:30:28Speaker 01

  Perfect.

• 1:30:29Jocko Willink?

  I never, and the sun might not be fully out. I was gonna ask, like, does it need to be hitting my skin? Or can it be kind of below the horizon? Are we good?

• 1:30:37Speaker 01

  On a day, on a cloudless day, it can be anywhere. On a day with more clouds, you probably want to try and orient toward where the sun might be and get out of the shade a little bit. Just so you don't have to be out there for more than five, 10 minutes.

• 1:30:48Jocko Willink?

  Okay, well, I'm going on, you know, half an hour, 45 minute run.

• 1:30:51Speaker 01

  Great.

• 1:30:52Jocko Willink?

  So we got some light. And by the way, interestingly, I don't, I wear sunglasses a lot, and maybe that's bad. I wear sunglasses actually almost all the time if I'm in the sun. But when I go for a run in the morning, I never wear sunglasses because of sweat and all this other stuff.

• 1:31:07Speaker 01

  And you have a lot of sun here in San Diego, so you're getting a lot of photons all day long. So there are a couple of things about your practice that are perfectly designed. One is you're, there are a few things. Let's, let's just make it really simple for people. The goal here is to increase body temperature in order to be awake. And to decrease body temperature in order to be asleep. If we stay with those themes, a lot of this will just fall into bins. So you wake up, getting sunlight in your eyes will enhance the, or bright artificial lights and then sunlight. If you're up before the sun comes out, turn on bright artificial lights if you want to be awake, right? Will enhance the cortisol pulse. Cortisol is going to further increase in body temperature.

• 1:31:48Speaker 01

  Exercising will increase body temperature. Somewhat paradoxically, getting into a cold shower or cold water. Everyone says, well, it must make you cold, right? Well, if you stand there a long time, you become hypothermic, right? But let's remember the thermostat example. You have a little area in your brain called the medial preoptic area. And if you make the surface of your body cold, guess what happens? Core body temperature goes up. So getting into, so if you're gonna do ice baths or cold showers, you can do, I would say, do them sometime better than not at all. And there's the whole thing relative to training we talked about, but. Early in the day would be better.

• 1:32:22Jocko Willink?

  Okay, so I get back from my run and I'm going in the ice bath.

• 1:32:25Speaker 01

  Perfect.

• 1:32:26Jocko Willink?

  So by I'm doing five to seven minutes in the ice bath.

• 1:32:28Speaker 01

  That's a good long ice bath, but you guys are, you guys are weaned in cold water.

• 1:32:32Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:33Speaker 01

  You guys, it was, I swim with a guy from the teams, Pat Dossit, and we sometimes would be, for me, it was a long swim, like a one mile, no wetsuit swim in the Pacific. For me, around the Santa Monica Pier and then, and then run back. For me, you know, I'm quaking like an alcoholic with delirium tremens. By the time I get to the coffee shop, we go in there sometimes quaking like this and I'm convinced they think that we're all have delirium tremens. You know, that's a cold swim for me and I don't do it very much anymore. I, I should do it more often, but what's interesting is he sees the water, you guys, like you see the water and it's like you want to get in the thing. For me, there's a 10 minute break in period where I'm like, oh my God, I can't believe it. And then you have the triathletes on the beach in their wetsuits going, are you really going to go in without, with, without wetsuits?

• 1:33:14Speaker 01

  And I was like, I didn't realize people go in with wetsuits, but I just go numb when I hit the water, but I never crave it. I always think, all right, I'm going to do this because here I am and like, if I don't go in, I'll feel bad about myself and that kind of thing.

• 1:33:27Jocko Willink?

  You're doing some serious negotiations.

• 1:33:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know. Right. Yeah. We all know how.

• 1:33:30Jocko Willink?

  Well, I will say, I, I think about like for, for my, for my ice bath in the morning, I've, I always think like, I feel so good when I get done that it's worth a little shock of when you get in. And actually you legitimately do get used to the, the quote shock of getting in. Like if I go on a trip for a week and I come back and wherever I am, there's no, there's no ice, which is pretty normal. There's not normal ice baths around the world, but when I come back, that first day, maybe even the second day, it's a little bit more of a little bit of a, I'm having some freaking Andrew Huberman conversations with myself.

• 1:34:05Speaker 01

  Oh my, now, now, now, now, um, now deliberation over hard work is, has a name. This is a, thank you. I deserve it. You're absolutely right. Yeah. Duds, not buds for me, but the, uh, so, well, I'm glad you mentioned the mood enhancing effects. So there's a beautiful paper published in the European Journal of Physiology in the year 2000, which took people and had them sit, they actually had them. Lawn chairs in water, a pool is a great way to run an experiment. I always say, people ask about cold showers, there are not a lot of experiments on cold showers because think about it's very hard to control. Is everyone under the shower the same way, etc. You put someone up in water up to their neck. It is what it is. You know what you're doing. So it's experimental rigor that drives that.

• 1:34:47Speaker 01

  But they had people get into reasonably cool water, 60 degrees Fahrenheit. So it's not that cold, but they had them stand for an hour. Or they've had people get into very cold water, something like 40 degrees for just 20 seconds. Now, here's what's really interesting. That shock that you referred to is adrenaline, also called epinephrine, and it is released from the adrenals, obviously, but also from a site in the brain called locus ceruleus, a little area of the brain stem that then sprinklers the rest of the brain with epinephrine and wakes up the rest of the brain. So that shock occurs in the brain and the body, and actually the stuff in the body doesn't cross the blood brain barrier. So you're a two-part system. We talk about this later because when those two systems are aligned, it's beautiful. When those two systems are out of alignment, that's not good. So you get into cold water, that's the shock.

• 1:35:31Speaker 01

  For the first 30 seconds, for most people who are untrained, your forebrain, which is controlling decision-making, is basically suppressed in its activity and other areas are ramped up. Is this when people get in go? Exactly, panic. Just understand that passes. Then what happens is when you get out of the cold, whether or not it's a longer period at 60 degrees or a short period, I would hate to hear that people are only doing 20 seconds, but maybe a minute to three minutes at 45 degrees or something. There's a long arc release of dopamine and epinephrine. That's what was shown in the study in humans, because people always go, well, it's just in my... No, in humans. And that long arc of dopamine leads to a near doubling or more of dopamine and epinephrine.

• 1:36:15Speaker 01

  In my colleague Anna Lempke's book called Dopamine Nation, she works on addiction, runs our dual diagnosis addiction clinic at Stanford. She talked about a patient of hers that basically helped himself get over cocaine addiction by doing cold baths because it was the only thing that would give him the kind of dopamine release that even slightly mimicked his cocaine addiction and allowed himself to wean himself off with a healthier behavior. Now, I'm not saying it's the equivalent of a drug like cocaine, but I am saying that it's a better decision than a drug like cocaine. For obvious reasons. So that mood enhancing effect that you feel afterwards, it's real. It's based on a real neurochemical effect. And that dopamine and epinephrine will, combined with the temperature increase from cortisol, plus light, plus exercise, all things that increase core body temperature.

• 1:37:00Speaker 01

  Now you've got increased core body temperature, you created a dopamine release, epinephrine, you've created a summer month inside your body. In the, in, I don't care if you live in Minneapolis in the depths of winter, or someplace even as cold as New Hampshire. You are, you are creating summer in your body by doing that. Now, if you live in San Diego, or Los Angeles, or Arizona, and it's the summer, and you're staying indoors, and you're on your phone, and you're not doing any movement until the afternoon, which is fine to exercise in the afternoon. I realize there's some important benefits of that. And you're laying in bed, or you're just walking around the kitchen, and putting on sunglasses and driving to work. Guess what? You're creating a Colorado winter inside of your body, despite the fact that the sun is out.

• 1:37:45Speaker 01

  So if you're wondering why you're slightly depressed, your metabolism is lower, your testosterone output is slightly lower than maybe you'd like it to be. There could be other reasons too, of course. But again, we're talking about modulators. I'm not saying getting sun in your eyes in the morning is going to make your testosterone perfect. What I'm saying is you're, you're setting an internal milieu through things that increase core body temperature, dopamine, epinephrine, et cetera. And that should be done relatively early in the day. Now, we could sort of skip to something about temperature, just to benefit people, kind of bookend the, the opposite end of the day. As the evening comes around, oh, I'm sorry, you asked a question, and I want to close the hatch on this, about sun low in the sky.

• 1:38:25Speaker 01

  You do not need to see the sun rise across the horizon. However, what we're, the cells in the eye that trigger all this, the so-called melanopsin ganglion cells, respond best to yellow, blue, Contrast, the next time you see a sunrise or a sunset, you will see the yellow-blue contrast I'm referring to. And what it's associated with is low solar angle sunlight. So if the sun is directly overhead, that yellow-blue contrast isn't there. Take a picture with your phone and everyone will see what I'm talking about. So you don't have to see the sunrise, if you're not getting up as early as Jaco, that's fine, but around, let's say you get up at 8:30 and you're outside by 9:00 and the sun is low in the sky, it's certainly not overhead, you're still getting that yellow-blue contrast that triggers the optimal activity of these cells.

• 1:39:06Speaker 01

  Ideally, you would also see, get some sunlight in your eyes in the afternoon, because it turns out you don't have one circadian clock, one master clock in your brain, you have two oscillators, this gets a little bit tricky in the biophysics, but you have a morning oscillator and an evening oscillator. For people that think about oscillators, you geeks out there, two oscillators can predict many more things, it's not, it's one plus one equals eight in this case. Having two oscillators allows you to do a number of computations in the brain, including timing the onset of sleep, metabolism, etc. So try and get some sunlight in your eyes in the evening as well. Here's why. Even though I said early in the day, you need sunlight and a lot of light to trigger these pathways, late in the day, retinal sensitivity goes up.

• 1:39:48Speaker 01

  So if you see bright light in the evening, and you're viewing too many screens and too much bright light in the evening, it's very easy to wake your system up again. So you want to really dim the lights in the evening. You don't necessarily have to wear blue blockers. In fact, if you're wearing blue blockers and the light is still too bright, it won't make a difference. Because it's broad-spectrum light will trigger these pathways. So dim the lights in the evening, lower the temperature in your home, or in the room that you sleep. And evening would be, or afternoon would be a great time to, I don't know, get in a sauna, take a hot shower, take a hot bath. Why? Well, if you stay in a long, long time, of course you'll heat up. But again, if you heat up the external part of the body, your core body temperature will drop after you get out of that sauna, after you get out of that bath.

• 1:40:33Speaker 01

  And when it comes to sauna, Dr. Rhonda Patrick's really the more proficient one here, but we've talked about this literature. There are a couple of ways to use sauna, I'll just mention, and hot baths work also really well.

• 1:40:45Speaker 01

  The studies showing enormous increases in growth hormone were done the following way. They had people get into a hot sauna for 30 minutes, then get out for five minutes. 30 minutes, then five minutes out. 30 minutes, then five minutes out for a total of two hours in the sauna. Between 175 and 210 degree sauna.

• 1:40:59Jocko Willink?

  How often?

• 1:41:00Speaker 01

  Once a week.

• 1:41:01Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 1:41:02Speaker 01

  If they did it more often, the amount of growth hormone release went from a 16-fold increase, which is pretty mega, down to a two or three-fold increase.

• 1:41:09Jocko Willink?

  Or got worse?

• 1:41:10Speaker 01

  Got worse because you become heat-adapted.

• 1:41:13Jocko Willink?

  Oh.

• 1:41:14Speaker 01

  And you can also become cold-adapted. So we could talk about cold and how to use cold, but remember, the more comfortable you get with a stimulus, the less of an adaptation effect you're getting, just like weights or running or anything else. Now, it is true that the more often that people did 20 minutes of sauna at 174 to 210 degrees Fahrenheit, I think that's 80 to 100 degrees Celsius if I recall, the more often they did that, two or three times a week turned out to be better than one, and five to seven times turned out to be better than two or three, for lowering all-cause mortality and death to cardiovascular events. So we're talking about growth hormone release, you want to do it every once in a while for many hours with breaks in the middle, for improved overall health, getting blood flow, you're talking, doing it every night would be great. So it depends on what your goal is. The same thing with the water.

• 1:41:59Speaker 01

  If you want to build resilience, well, make the stimulus as terrible as possible. And here's an easy way to do it. I like to kind of poke fun at the tough guys on the internet who get into the ice bath and sit there really stoic. Well, guess what? There's this thing called a thermal layer that builds up around you, and you're sitting there really stoic. You're not making it as cold as you could be, guys and gals. Sift your body around a little bit. Now it's cold. Get those hands under, get those feet under, and pedal those while keeping your mind calm. It is considerably colder because you're breaking up that thermal layer.

• 1:42:29Jocko Willink?

  It sucks.

• 1:42:30Speaker 01

  Hence the waves on, uh, out there on Coronado, right?

• 1:42:33Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it sucks when you, because at my ice bath, well, I have like the little jet, mine has a little jet on the side, you know, it's ionizing the water or whatever, so it's shooting in, and like that side is super cold because it's flowing past your body. My other side, I've got it perfectly still. I got a thermal layer just, you know, keeping me all toasty warm on that right side.

• 1:42:54Speaker 01

  Well, I would say, um, you know, it's... It's fun to play with the ice bath because you can, what you're doing is you can play with your relationship to adrenaline. So the way I think about ice baths and cold showers and things like that, I think of it as a series of walls. When you get into the shock that you described, that's a pulse of adrenaline in your brain and body. But then, you know, you might ask yourself this question, you know, if you can withstand something for a second, why not a minute? And if a minute, why not three hours? Well, the reason is, is that adrenaline is released in pulsatile fashion and they, it compounds a one wave, then another wave. So it's, you're building, it's like an upward spiral of adrenaline. It's not one then down to zero, one, it's one down to point five, two point five. So it's building on itself in the brain and body. And as it circulates, it gets more and more

• 1:43:39Speaker 01

  painful until you go numb and then it gets easier, as you know. So one thing to do is to just imagine and actually learn to sense the waves of adrenaline. So maybe the first wave is just getting in the damn thing. Maybe climbing, I think of that as one wall. You've climbed over that wall, now you're in. Then you could say, well, I'm gonna go 30 seconds. And then maybe at 20 seconds, you'll feel that wall. You thought 30, but that wall comes. Climb that wall. What you'll start to notice is the walls actually start getting further and further apart because adrenaline has this incredible anti-inflammatory numbing quality to it. So the walls actually get lower as time goes on, but they start off very high. That's the way that I think about the ice bath and that maps to the way that adrenaline physiology actually functions. So again, it's that first, those first steps are the hardest. I think about this when I wake up in the morning and I don't want

• 1:44:24Speaker 01

  to do something. I often see your watch staring at me on my phone. I do. And I think, ah, like this is a big wall. And I think, okay, but the walls are gonna be diminishing over time. Even if it gets harder, adrenaline bolsters you in that way. It's a magical molecule. So toward evening, heat is going to be beneficial. The other thing is dim the lights, obviously, because lights are serving as a wake up signal. And then, you know, a lot of people have this problem that they go to sleep and then they wake up at three in the morning or two in the morning, they can't fall back asleep. And so I said the two major modulators are sleep and non-sleep deep rest. And non-sleep deep rest, or NSDR, is a phrase that, to be Direct I coined to encompass a lot of behaviors that are designed to just teach

• 1:45:09Speaker 01

  you to lower your level of activation in your nervous system. Meditation is one form, but the problem with meditation is meditation involves focus. You have to pay attention to your breath, for instance, sit there and meditate. That actually puts a high demand on the metabolic systems of the forebrain. So it's work. It's like reading, except you're reading your breaths and your thoughts. Non-sleep deep rest includes things like, it has a kind of corny name for some, it's called yoga nidra, which means yoga sleep. You lie down, you just listen to a script. You can find these on YouTube or elsewhere. 10-minute ones or 30-minute ones. Take you through a body scan, some long exhale breathing. Talk about why this calms the body. Or there are various forms of hypnosis that really involve teaching you to relax.

• 1:45:51Speaker 01

  So non-sleep deep rest is kind of a general term for things that we deliberately do to teach our body to down-regulate in real time. And so I highly recommend that if people have trouble falling back asleep in the middle of the night, that they turn on a yoga nidra and listen to that. Or they use an app like Reverie, which I think they have a free trial on there.

• 1:46:12Jocko Willink?

  Is yoga nidra English-speaking? Or is it a chant? Or what's yoga nidra got going on?

• 1:46:17Speaker 01

  It means yoga sleep. It's existed for thousands of years. As you lie down, the scripts are in English, the ones that you'll find on YouTube. There's actually an NSDR script put out by a team guy and his company made for. And these are, again, zero-cost tools. You can just listen to them. It takes you through a body scan, a lot of long exhale breathing. The reason he put that out there and the reason why I talk about NSDR is that when people hear yoga nidra, or they hear meditation, they think, you know, flying carpets, monks in lotus position. And one of the problems with science and with some of the better practices from different communities in, you know, Asian and Indian communities is that a lot of it's vaulted behind language. You know, science is guilty of this too.

• 1:47:02Speaker 01

  You start talking about adrenaline and locus cerullus, and if you don't put it in context, people are like, ah, yeah, that doesn't mean anything to me. Yoga nidra, it sounds like something very foreign. At the end of the day, non-sleep deep rest practices are all about the same thing. We have a system in our body called the autonomic nervous system. This is the system that when a bomb blast goes off, or you hear a loud noise, immediately put adrenaline in your body. The most amazing molecule, right? I mean, if you think about it, you didn't need sleep, you didn't need a nap, you didn't need caffeine, all of a sudden you are alert, you're done. You're there, rather. And That's the so-called sympathetic nervous system getting activated. Broad system goes out, it's called simpa, cause simpa means together. And you have a chain of neurons called the sympathetic chain ganglia that run from your belly button up to about your heart.

• 1:47:47Speaker 01

  When some external stimulus or some thought triggers the sympathetic nervous system, all those cells fire up boom at once. They just pulse of adrenaline into your body or they trigger the pathways.

• 1:47:58Jocko Willink?

  Is that, so is when you're driving and you almost get in an accident and you feel the adrenaline like reaching out to your fingers, that you feel it come, that's what's happening?

• 1:48:07Speaker 01

  Literally emanates from the center. And it, what's interesting is in fish and in other animals, all mammals of all kinds, but also in fish. It actually triggers the muscles of the, of the, the thoracic muscles and the motor neurons there to start undulating to know which direction to go. Animals that get into a threat mode often have an undulation to them. That's the sympathetic nervous system. You know, a body in motion is more available for movement in any trajectory as opposed to being completely still. Et cetera. So then you have another system, which is the parasympathetic nervous system. It's like the other end of the seesaw and it's neurons that exist from the neck down to about the heart. And from the belly button down to the bottom of your tailbone. Those are the ones, that so-called rest and digest system, but it's much more than that.

• 1:48:50Speaker 01

  It's also the system that allows you to dilate your gaze reflexively. Right? You can learn how to do that under states of high adrenaline if you like. But naturally, when you're relaxed, your gaze dilates. Reproduction is kind of a balance between the two. The process of reproducing, the verb literally of sex, not the biological sex, but the verb sex is a, is a process of the autonomic seesaw. There's arousal, which involves a kind of balance in these systems, et cetera. Kids, look it up, not too young, appropriately aged kids, look it up. But that's, it's, it's inherent to the, to the evolution of our species is a balance between activation and calm. And so when. We are born, we have an asymmetry in this autonomic nervous system.

• 1:49:35Speaker 01

  That asymmetry is the following. None of us need to learn how to stress or react. Adrenaline, that system, the activation of the sympathetic nervous system is automatic in response to different thoughts and stimuli. Cold, for instance, being the universal trigger of adrenaline. Why not use heat? Well, you can only use so much heat before you damage tissues or kill people. You can use a lot of cold, as they know on Coronado. You can use cold a lot before, you have to be careful, but you have to get pretty damn cold for a long time before you die. But do be careful with this stuff, obviously. Now, the parasympathetic system is different. We rarely learn how to calm ourselves. We all are familiar with getting sleepy and falling asleep. That's the parasympathetic nervous system taking over. The longer we are awake, the longer the buildup of something called adenosine in the brain

• 1:50:20Speaker 01

  and body, and adenosine turns on the parasympathetic nervous system, suppresses the sympathetic nervous system. When we sleep, adenosine is pushed back down. What is caffeine? Caffeine effectively, through some chemical steps, blocks the effects of adenosine. So if you wait, so here's a little trick if you, that's, I don't like the word hacks, because hacks imply using something for a purpose it wasn't designed for. Here, we're talking about hardwired biology. But if you wake up in the morning and you didn't sleep quite as much as you would have liked, that means, and you're sleepy, that means you still have a buildup of adenosine in your system. Let's say you immediately reach for caffeine. Great, you suppress the action of that adenosine and you will be more alert. And guess what happens? Then the caffeine wears off and the adenosine binds to the receptors with greater affinity

• 1:51:04Speaker 01

  and you have your afternoon crash. So a practice that's very useful to people is to delay the intake of caffeine by 60 to 90 minutes after waking. Allow the adenosine to be cleared out, because it's not just cleared out in sleep, it's also cleared out in those kind of sleepy states of early morning. So allow it to be cleared out. The other thing that clears it out? Exercise. So when you get up in the morning, you're kind of sleepy, I don't want to do this, I don't want to do this, but you hydrate and train, you clear out the adenosine. Now, I like to drink caffeine before I train or during training. I'm weak like that. But for people that have an afternoon crash, this can have tremendous benefits of, and maybe start by pushing it out 15 minutes per day. Most, everyone that does this says, oh my goodness, I didn't understand why in the

• 1:51:49Speaker 01

  afternoon I'm crashing so hard. This will really, really help. I've been curious, do you drink coffee before you train?

• 1:51:55Jocko Willink?

  Nope.

• 1:51:56Speaker 01

  That's for weak people, right?

• 1:52:00Jocko Willink?

  I don't like the taste of coffee, but I also don't drink any caffeine. I don't drink one of my, one of my go drinks or anything like that. And I just wake up, you know, I drink water in the morning and I go work out. And I've, I've thought about it, you know, I thought, and this, I, I thought about it and I always thought, well,

• 1:52:17Jocko Willink?

  honestly, I thought it seems kind of weak to like have to do that, right?

• 1:52:21Speaker 01

  There you go.

• 1:52:21Jocko Willink?

  So I didn't do it. Uh, but there has been times I'm thinking, man, like I'll see, you know, you know, look at other people and they'll be like drinking coffee. Isn't working out first thing in the morning and I'm thinking, you know, maybe I should do it, you know, maybe I am wrong. And I'm open to being totally wrong.

• 1:52:36Speaker 01

  Well, here's the thing. Um, if adrenaline is the most incredible molecule in biology, and I do believe it is for its capacity to immediately grab our attentional systems and our readiness systems. Dopamine is perhaps the second place winner there, but still a significant one. You know, there's this incredible experiment that's been done in animals and humans that really illustrates what dopamine does. Take two rats and they've done this with people in naturally occurring situations and you put rats next to some delicious water, like the lake water with sucrose in it or a delicious food and you, and the rats will reach up and drink that or eat that food. One of the rats, it turns out, doesn't even have neurons that make dopamine

• 1:53:18Speaker 01

  or all their dopamine is blocked by the injection of a drug. Turns out they will indulge in that food just fine. Just like the one that has plenty of dopamine.

• 1:53:26Jocko Willink?

  So just to, just to make sure I'm tracking, so you've got two rats.

• 1:53:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:53:29Jocko Willink?

  One of them has, their dopamine has been blocked.

• 1:53:32Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 1:53:33Jocko Willink?

  But at this point, they're both just eating the sugary, drinking the sugary water. Just everything's fine.

• 1:53:39Speaker 01

  Yep. Tastes good and they experience pleasure. Both of them experience pleasure. Proof that dopamine is not required to experience pleasure. Now you do a simple experiment. You simply move the location of the food or water, one rat length away from the rat. And guess what? The rat with its dopamine walks over and eats the food. It might even cross a little metal plate where it gets an electrical shock. But you know, it's hungry and it wants to eat, so it'll take the zap and do it. The rat without dopamine won't even walk one rat's length to get its dopamine, even if the food is laid out on the floor for it.

• 1:54:19Speaker 01

  Dopamine is not the molecule of pleasure, it is the molecule of motivation, desire and pursuit.

• 1:54:25Jocko Willink?

  See, this is interesting. We had an experiment that we talked about on here. I had, back in the day, I had an RV. And for whatever reason, we had, I had taken the mint chocolate chip ice cream and put it in the RV freezer for some reason, I forget why. And, you know, when that, when that stuff's in the freezer in the house, it was like, oh, cool. I'm gonna get it, it's right there. We're gonna go get it, right? But I guess I wasn't dopamine fueled enough. Like, three, four, five days went by before I was like, oh, I really want it, so I'm gonna go get it.

• 1:54:56Speaker 01

  Well, it's, it is the molecule of drive. The way to think about dopamine is that it is a non-infinite, yet renewable resource. Non-infinite, yet renewable. What do I mean by that? Well, this relates to the energy drink caffeine question. Should you be doing all this stuff? Just as adrenaline, epinephrine, is released in response to psychological stressors, physical stressors, cold water, final exams, you know, broken relationship, excitement. These are generic molecules, right? I mean, they're, they're used to create activation states in the body. Dopamine is the molecule of motivation, pursuit and desire. And it can be triggered by a number of different things.

• 1:55:38Speaker 01

  However, it is a non-infinite, yet renewable resource. So, if you have too big a dopamine release, let's say from methamphetamine, cocaine.

• 1:55:50Jocko Willink?

  Damn, we're going there.

• 1:55:51Speaker 01

  We're going there. Or, or, or let's say, to be fair, because I, you know, know people for it. Or from being in a lot of gunfights in, in a short period of time. The period immediately after that will involve a mirror symmetric decrease in dopamine. You don't go back down to baseline, you go below baseline. So... We all should guard our dopamine peaks very carefully. A little bit goes a long way. A lot goes even further, but it also takes you down deeper afterwards. This is the basis of addiction. And this is the beautiful work of Anilemki and Rob Malanca at Stanford and elsewhere. Showing that it-

• 1:56:29Jocko Willink?

  When it goes down, do we want it back right now?

• 1:56:32Speaker 01

  Ah, so the dip afterwards is actually associated with a molecule called dynorphin, which is the opposite of endorphin and involves pain in the body. So for every bit of pleasure that we get from pursuit and getting the thing that we were pursuing, the crash that comes afterwards feels painful. And all that we need to do in order to return to a baseline of dopamine, renew that resource, is to wait and make sure that we don't try and trigger yet more dopamine in that time. So you asked about, should I be taking caffeine in addition to training and blasting music? I always say, people differ on this spectrum, but be careful about stacking dopamine. Training itself is a stimulus for dopamine release.

• 1:57:15Speaker 01

  Cold water is a stimulus for dopamine release. But if you start doing training, cold water, listening to your favorite music, plus you're taking, let's say, some stimulant. Doesn't, obviously, the stimulants we've been talking about are terrible, but some of the stronger stimulants out there. Used to be ephedrine back when I was in college, but now people taking adderall-

• 1:57:38Jocko Willink?

  Rip fuel.

• 1:57:39Speaker 01

  Is that rip fuel? Now illegal, right? Now illegal, yeah.

• 1:57:42Jocko Willink?

  I had a guy I worked with, unfortunately, he died, but he, you would see, like, he was in my platoon. You would see, he would take that. He called it ripy rip.

• 1:57:54Speaker 01

  Well, and it readies you. Actually, you can tell if somebody has a lot of dopamine and adrenaline in their system just by looking at them. Their pupils are big. So somewhat paradoxically, when pupils are big, your visual aperture is narrow. That just has to do with the so-called accommodation of the eye, the optics of the eye. So remember, big pupils means somebody is high on their own dopamine and adrenaline. Could be drug-induced, could be situational, et cetera. Small pupils are going to be a relaxed state. Now, of course, it's also going to be modulated by how bright it is in an environment because of the way these systems work. But when you can see somebody wide-eyed, well, dopamine and adrenaline also do something else. They actually trigger activation of the brainstem cranial nuclei that cause opening of the eyelids. They also cause an eyes up effect. When we get sleepy, what happens? Our eyes go down.

• 1:58:39Speaker 01

  When we're awake, eyelids are open and eyes are up. They might not be up like this. These relate to three different cranial nerve nuclei for the future med students. You'll learn what these are. So it all makes perfect sense when, when, because nature is beautiful and the biology is laid out for us. But if we start stacking behaviors, plus pharmacology, plus, you know, mindsets that increase dopamine, great. But what that means is that if you get a really big dopamine increase, well, then that afternoon, you might not feel the drive to do the work. You might think, why am I sleeping in the afternoon? Why am I kind of less motivated? Or next day for training without that pharmacology, you're thinking, oh yeah, that the workout isn't, I don't get quite as intense a contraction of the muscles.

• 1:59:21Jocko Willink?

  The hype train left the building.

• 1:59:23Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:59:25Speaker 01

  Is that what you thought? The hype train?

• 1:59:26Jocko Willink?

  Well, I'm just thinking about it because, you know, a lot of times people ask me, you know, I have a hard time, you know, like I get fired up to do stuff, but then I don't actually do it, you know? That's a common sort of thing for humans. And, and now I can kind of track it a little bit. Oh, you got yourself super worked up. And then you let that go or you, you know, maybe you worked for a little bit of time, you know, like, hey, writing a book, right? I've written a bunch of books. You're not like hyped to write the book. You might, you might, oh man, this is going to be, and you, that only lasts for seven minutes of typing, bro.

• 1:59:59Speaker 01

  It's chop wood, carry water.

• 2:00:01Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Then it's like, oh, this is just going to suck. And that's just the way it is. But now I realize if you, this is what I like about this. If you're aware of the fact that, oh, this is my dopamine crash and I can't, I shouldn't anticipate continued hype through this situation. I need to push through it. That's, that's good awareness to have.

• 2:00:23Speaker 01

  Definitely. And you know, nowadays you hear, especially in Silicon Valley about dopamine fasting, you know, the people, I don't even want to look at somebody else's face. I'm not going to eat any, you know, tasty food. I'm not going to do anything that stimulates dopamine. Sure. That will reset what you find pleasurable. But let's be realistic. The better way to do things would be to modulate dopamine release. Control it. Make it work for you. And everyone's going to differ. So for some people, it's got to be music, the pre-workout, the, you know, uh, four cups of espresso and, and, you know, and someone screaming in their face that they have to do it. Well, for other people. Require fewer of those variables. But everyone needs to learn how they feel both before, during, and after a behavior. You know, I think the right amount of exercise is what you can do consistently and train hard,

• 2:01:08Speaker 01

  but that also allow you to perform, unless you're an athlete and that's your profession, to be able to do the other things throughout the day that are beneficial to you. And of course, some people are training late in the day, and I have no problem with that. I got kind of attacked by the fitness anistas recently, or whatever you call them online, because I said, you know, training early in the day sets this dopamine pulse. I'm like, training late in the day has been shown in these nineteen studies. Sure, I'm sure for when your body temperature is elevated later in the day, you know, lubrication of the joints and mental acuity, sure. But for most people who just need to get more movement or trying to maximize focus and productivity throughout the day, early day training is going to be probably the better option. But sometime is better than no time. But if you're training late in the day,

• 2:01:52Speaker 01

  and you're getting a big increase in body temperature, and you're doing it under bright lights, and you're drinking a pre-workout, and you're wondering why you can't sleep at night. It's, you know, you don't have to be Sigmund Freud or a neuroscientist to understand that you're basically just have your body, you're cranking your body temperature up. Hence, a lot of these technologies, and here, this isn't a promotion, we don't, at least not now, don't have a relationship to any of them. I won't even name them. There are a lot of technologies now about making your bed cool. This matter, that, this, you know, to cool down your body temperature at night so you can sleep. So if you start thinking about this and you have a rational structure, it makes sense. It also makes sense why, for instance, after a big win, sometimes we feel a crash, and we need some time to reset. And that lower depression, sometimes people make the mistake of going out and pursuing more dopamine.

• 2:02:37Speaker 01

  One of the areas that I have real concern about, just because I hear about it so often, and it wasn't an issue when I was growing up, is a lot of young guys in particular approach me because they're, based on the questions I'm getting, they're watching a lot of really intense pornography. And that has, we know, there are studies now going on at Stanford and elsewhere. Pornography creates a strong dopamine rush. These are very primitive pathways that in some ways can overwhelm the dopamine system. And then, you know, another thing is happening. So a lot of young guys are getting all this arousal from watching other people have sex. And then they're in the real world scenario and it's like, wait, you're no longer third personing this. You're in, you're actually in this scene and it's completely collapsing them. And so I'm not one of these anti porn people. I, you know, I'm not here to judge.

• 2:03:22Speaker 01

  I'm just a scientist. I'm reporting the, I always say I'm, I'm not a doctor. I don't prescribe things. I'm a professor, so I profess things. You can decide what you want to do with it or not. But if you, once you understand dopamine, that all makes perfect sense. They're getting this enormous dopamine release from something that is external to them. And real life, you know, may not mimic the intensity of the combination of variables, right? Or people are exercising for a little while and it's all exciting to them and they're, and they're, you know, taking tons and tons of pharmacology to do it. And then they kind of lose motivation. Well, it, remember, non-infinite yet renewable resource.

• 2:03:57Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's, uh, being aware of these things, I think is so important because what, you know, if, uh, if, if, if I said, hey, I'm, you're going to walk through my house and I'm going to scare you. I'm going to jump out and scare you at some point. I, I, I probably wouldn't be able to do it because you'd be aware, waiting and I'd jump out and go boo. And you'd be like, oh yeah, you know, whatever.

• 2:04:18Speaker 01

  Probably be able to do it.

• 2:04:20Jocko Willink?

  But imagine if I didn't tell you.

• 2:04:22Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:04:22Jocko Willink?

  And I said, yeah, come by my house and, uh, you know, just, just let yourself in. I'll be there in a little while. Then I freaking jumped out and scared you. You'd be scared because you're not aware of it. You're not aware of what's going to happen. So having awareness, I remember had a, a fighter who had been a highly competitive wrestler. And he was going to fight in a, in a big organization. And he was sort of like, I was like, hey, are you feeling nervous at all? This was a couple of weeks prior. Hey, are you feeling nervous? He's kind of blown me off a little bit. You know, hey, I've been fighting for, I've been, I've been wrestling for my whole life. I've been competing. I've been on the national stage, blah, blah, blah, right? I'm not nervous. I said, okay, great. I should have known better. Cause when he went and fought, now he's in the UFC and he got nervous.

• 2:05:06Jocko Willink?

  And what really I think messed him up was he didn't understand what was happening. And then I remembered, I used to talk to like a new guy that was showing up on deployment. And you'd see him before an op and you could just see the look on their face, like they are scared. And what they're scared of is they're scared of getting, getting killed and get blown up. That's fine. They're scared of doing a bad job. That's fine. But what really is making them nervous is the fact that they feel nervous. They don't even know what that feels like. Cause they made it through training and they've jumped out of airplanes and they've, you know, scuba dived at night off the coast. And so they're, they're used to being afraid and they don't, they don't feel fear anymore. So they don't even understand what it feels like. So then all of a sudden they get knots in their stomach, their heart rate's going and they, that's what they're scared of. They're like, why am I feeling

• 2:05:48Jocko Willink?

  like this? And it's freaking them out. So when you say, oh, hey, you, uh, you feel like you got some butterflies in your stomach right now? You know, feel like your heart's going a little bit? And they're like, and they don't want to tell you the truth. They're like, no, no, I feel fine. It's like bullshit. I can see. And they go, yeah. And it's like, cool. You're just, you're just nervous. It's just your body getting ready for combat. It's no big deal. Everyone's going to feel like that. And then they feel okay. So situations that you're talking about where if you don't know what it is, i- it's like that enough can, can, can make you fall. Whereas you say, hey, listen, after you get a good big dopamine hit, you're not going to feel fired up three hours later. That's when you got to put in the work. Be aware of the fact that you won't feel like doing it. Cause

• 2:06:31Jocko Willink?

  people think, well, I just didn't feel like going anymore. It's like, yeah, of course you didn't. You got all your dopamine and you already used it and you need to let that thing rebuild. But you can still go get a good workout in, you can go still complete the task and go still write some more, you know, for your book that you're doing or do whatever labor you gotta do. So I think it's very important for people to understand what's going on inside. So they don't feel like it's, dude, maybe I don't even want to do this. You know, maybe I don't even want to be here. You know, I'm not, you know, I just get, get to, cause I train jiu jitsu at night. Or in the afternoon. And man, when I was in the team, sometimes you come home and you're like, man, do I really even want to do this right now? And I would just say, yeah, you do. Yeah. And it doesn't matter how you feel. You're just going to go do it. So being able to overcome

• 2:07:13Jocko Willink?

  that, I think that's what's nice about what you're informing us of is people can now go, oh, I know what this is. This isn't me being a wimp. This isn't me, you know, not wanting to do this. It's my own natural, you know, hormones that are doing this thing, making me feel this way, and I can just work through them.

• 2:07:31Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Extremely well put. You know, earlier I mentioned, in the reference to sunlight, I talked about dopamine and testosterone. Testosterone has a huge number of effects in the body, and its sibling molecule, if you will, dihydrotestosterone is perhaps the more dominant androgen in humans.

• 2:07:49Jocko Willink?

  Dihydrotestosterone.

• 2:07:50Speaker 01

  DHT.

• 2:07:51Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 2:07:52Speaker 01

  Uh, you know, there are pharmacologic versions of this, right? Oxandrolone, anavoir, I'm not suggesting people take those, right? What I'm talking about is the DHT you make naturally, very powerful androgen. It's converted from testosterone into the, you get DHT in a conversion of testosterone to DHT through a molecule called five alpha reductase. Anytime you hear ACE, it's almost always an enzyme. ACE is basically, you know, cap, you know, protein ACE, you know, that, okay. So, DHT, uh, it's going to cause some male pattern baldness. So this, your widow's peak, your widow's peak. Yep. What was it? Widow's peak?

• 2:08:24Jocko Willink?

  Sure.

• 2:08:24Speaker 01

  Uh, my, my now elaborating widow's peak, that's dihydrotestosterone, causes beard growth on the face and causes male pattern baldness, has inverse effect on the scalp and on the face. Like, it has other effects. Strength, et cetera. The testosterone molecule and the dopamine molecule bear a very close relationship. So if somebody pushes, pushes, pushes really hard, wins, wins, wins, yes, that will increase testosterone. Winning increases testosterone, losing decreases testosterone in all venues. So, they look at this with, with day traders, win, win, win, win, win, more money, they get more testosterone. Losing, okay, now here's the interesting thing. I had an episode of the podcast with the great Robert Sapolsky, who wrote Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers, The Trouble With Testosterone,

• 2:09:06Speaker 01

  et cetera. Let's talk about the effects of testosterone and DHT in the brain. The main effect of these androgens in the brain is to make effort feel good.

• 2:09:17Speaker 01

  Because of the way that testosterone and DHD bind to receptors and activate certain components of the amygdala, we always think of the amygdala as a fear center, but it's a threat detection center and it has a lot of different parts, including parts that allow you to be forward center of mass in response to pressure. So, am I suggesting people take exogenous testosterone? No, that's a personal choice that people can explore on their own if they want to do that. But if you've been pushing, pushing, pushing, and winning, winning, or just pushing really hard and then you've experienced that crash, a lot of people need some time to recover in order to be able to come back and be able to work hard again. But here's what's really interesting. Not only does testosterone make effort feel good, effort increases testosterone.

• 2:10:02Speaker 01

  So this is the athlete or the student who's like, "I don't want to do it, I don't want to do anything." Getting into some degree of forward center of mass, I always say, I think I picked this up from a team guy, it's very team guy language, you can either be back on your heels, flatfooted, or forward center of mass, on anything. Getting into that forward center of mass, mental orientation can start to trigger some of the pathways related to these hormones and these neuromodulators. What you don't want to do is start using a lot of exogenous factors, caffeine, or a lot of things outside of you in order to try and create those states, because then you're going to further deplete your dopamine and so on. When, I think you went on Rogan at one point and I overheard a portion, I listened to a portion of the conversation where you said you had been working really hard and then you went on vacation and then you got sick. Yeah. So this is interesting, that's the autonomic nervous system.

• 2:10:46Speaker 01

  That's happened to me like numerous times. Okay, so there's a very clear explanation for that and a very simple remedy, although it's not obvious, which is why many people experience this. Many people experience studying for finals and then it ends getting sick. Taking care of a loved one, round the clock, the person either gets better, sometimes dies, or whatever it is, and then... The caretaker gets sick. Why is that? Well, we always hear that stress compromises the immune system. Nothing could be further from the truth. Stress activates the immune system. Think about it, how would your immune system, your spleen and your other immune organs of the body know when it's under pressure? Well, you could have some foreign bacteria or virus in your body,

• 2:11:29Speaker 01

  but when you are in a mode of go, go, go, the molecule adrenaline triggers the release of killer B cells and T cells from the spleen. It's when you relax. Now, you need to get your sleep, but it's when you finally experience that symmetric swing back of the sea sauce. You're go, go, go, go, go, boom. And then you completely relax and you're hanging out and all of a sudden you get the sniffle and the rest of the thing. This is, there's a beautiful study done by, that was done in response to none other than Wim Hof, believe it or not. There's a really beautiful, quality scientific study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, where they had two groups of people. One group meditated, the other group did Wim Hof type breathing. So what we call in the laboratory cyclic hyperventilation. So inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale 25 times.

• 2:12:15Speaker 01

  Forceful inhales and forceful exhales. Then hold your breath, lungs empty for 15 seconds, repeat for about three rounds. What does that do? Why do you heat up adrenaline? It's such a generic thing. It's adrenaline, you could have gotten into an ice bath, adrenaline. You could have someone shout in your face, adrenaline. It's just adrenaline. What, what did they do? They injected both groups of people with E. coli. Injected them with E. coli. One group gets nauseous, vomiting and feels sick. The group that does this cyclic hyperventilation Wim Hof, also called tumo-type breathing, far fewer symptoms, if any, including lack of fever. So why? Well, they were able to combat the, the attack of this bacteria. So if you're coming off of a hard bout of work

• 2:12:58Speaker 01

  and you're starting to relax into vacation, you would be wise to still get into some cold water. You would be wise to still do some cyclic hyperventilation breathing. Certainly don't do those at the same time. A number of people actually have died doing cyclic hyperventilation and then doing breath holds. Cause when you exhale a lot of carbon dioxide, carbon dioxide is the trigger to breathe. This is really important. If, if you do hyperventilation.

• 2:13:22Speaker 01

  And then you hold your breath, you can do a much longer breath hold than you could if you just started off without having done that. Why? That you don't take breaths because of a need for oxygen, although you do need that. You take breaths because of a buildup of carbon dioxide triggers these brainstem neurons which have you do the gasp reflex. Okay, well, if you dump all your carbon dioxide and you're not a skilled freediver, like Markeely or somebody like that who really understands that, what happens is you're swimming along, you're like, wow, I can really hold my breath down here a long time. Lights out. Actually, I'm aware of a few people in the military community who who've dabbled with Wim Hof tumo-type breathing and have died and it's not good. I think it's not allowed, basically. It's certainly not encouraged, from what I understand. So,

• 2:14:05Speaker 01

  do it on land, away from water. And the idea here is that adrenaline protects us. You don't want it cascading out of control so that you can't sleep. You want to use things like non-sleep deep rest and the appropriate timing of light and exercise, etc. to be able to sleep well at night to reset all these systems. But if you go too quickly from go, go, go, go, go to complete relaxation, your immune system, your defense system will crash too. And so you're not going to be able to fight off even the even the smallest or the, you know, the pettiest of viruses and bacteria. That's when you get the sniffle, you get sick. You're like, I'm finally resting. What's going on? So you can taper out of those high intensity phases. There are actually, you know, guys in the teams now that I think are aware of this and are starting to think about this and for various effects. But in

• 2:14:49Speaker 01

  the mind, testosterone makes effort feel good. Adrenaline puts us into a mode of readiness. Dopamine puts us into a mode of motivation. And then there's the mirror side of all this, which are the neurochemicals that broadly defined promote relaxation and parasympathetic activation. And those come under the names that you've probably heard them before, like serotonin, oxytocin, and the hormone prolactin.

• 2:15:12Speaker 01

  Serotonin and oxytocin are molecules that make us feel good, make us feel soothed, not in response to things that we're motivated to go get, but in response to what we already have. So this might sound a little woo, but you know, if you sit there and do a gratitude practice, or you hang out with your dog and your kids, or you eat a meal, right? You're nourishing yourself with food that you are not in the process of having to kill first. You're just really in, you know, Thanksgiving, a few moments of appreciation, simple things. The feel-good that you experience, the love and kindness meditations, these kinds of things. We know, based on neuroimaging studies and blood draws and things of that sort, promote the release of things like serotonin and oxytocin.

• 2:15:53Speaker 01

  That nature has designed beautiful systems of pursuit and pleasure that are designed to oscillate and designed to keep us in pursuit and pleasure cycles. In relationships, typically, the dopamine phase is the early phase. Simultaneously in these cycles? Oftentimes, not simultaneously. Typically, dopamine and serotonin are released, always, there's always some floating around our system at any moment, but typically, dopamine and adrenaline are associated with pursuit of things that are outside the confines of our immediate possession in our skin. And serotonin is more about the things that we have, the things, you know, get, seeing your kid, holding your kid, that promotes the release of oxytocin and serotonin. It feels amazing, right? These are the molecules that led to our evolution as a species.

• 2:16:37Speaker 01

  So, I'm not diminishing one or the other, but they need to oscillate, right? An early relationship, there are times when people aren't sleeping very much. It's like a mental illness. It's like, it's a form of mania. You're so excited, you don't need sleep, right? People are able to, to do all sorts of things at frequency and intensity that they find themselves two years later in a relationship, and they love the person, it's very warm and cozy, but, well, unless they're going off on deployments and coming back, they don't have that reset of the, of the system. So, you know, the ability to miss somebody, reset that pursuit and desire system. These are powerful systems, and they don't just pertain to romantic relationships. This is also school. I always, you know, I always did summer school because I had to do a lot of catching up

• 2:17:21Speaker 01

  to do, based on the, you know, a lot of catching up. But, you know, there's some value in taking a week off. And realizing you are truly resetting all the systems for pursuit. And I hear from a lot of hard driving folks who like, wow, once I understood dopamine, I realized why I'm so burnt out. People think of adrenal burnout. Guess what? There's no actual medical term adrenal burnout. There's adrenal insufficiency syndrome. That's a rare syndrome, but you have enough adrenaline packed away in your brain and body to for three lifetimes. Think about what people used to go through. I mean, you talk about some of this on your podcast. You see the images of people and you read the stories like you can make it through finals, kids.

• 2:18:02Speaker 01

  So that what happens though, is we're in such modes of pursuit and overthinking and overthinking, we need to learn how to switch back and forth on a regular basis. What I call deliberate decompression or non-sleep deep rest. Have a practice each day of 10 to 30 minutes where you're not on your phone and you're in kind of a wordless state. You're just either yoga nidra or you're just relaxing or not watching anything, not taking in any sensory information, not meditating, not journaling, just in a state of just trying to blank your mind and just watch how much stronger you come back in terms of your ability to focus and your motivation. That's one, I love the phone and social media has been very good to me and I appreciate many of its features.

• 2:18:43Speaker 01

  But one of the problems is, is we tend to fill our idle time with more sensory information. And that doesn't allow us to go into this deliberate decompression. It doesn't allow us to, you remember I cut myself off, but a picture is worth a thousand words. Well, a movie is worth a million pictures. Now I can scroll through millions of movies very quickly. And so the dopamine system is just a little bit overwhelmed. I don't think we need to be off our phones all the time. We just take some time to just deliberately decompress each day, any time of day. And you'll focus better.

• 2:19:11Jocko Willink?

  So you're getting hit with that dopamine on, on Instagram.

• 2:19:15Speaker 01

  So at first you are, but here's how you know dopamine and it's this will give you a window into addiction. If you're, if you're not an addict, you'll be able to sympathize with, maybe even empathize with addicts of various kinds. When you first get on social media, you're excited. Maybe you or Joe or somebody has a new podcast out, right? You know, you're excited, oh, I can't wait to hear this. That's dopamine. You're motivated. But if you ever find yourself doing a behavior and you kind of don't know why you're doing it, like this doesn't feel any good anymore. It's like that, what is that Chris, well now he's, it's a funny story there because new stuff, but that Chris Rock thing where he's talking about like, you know, when you're shanking somebody and your heart's just not in it.

• 2:19:52Speaker 01

  Does this funny thing, right? I think it was him. You're sort of like that, like, yeah, your heart's not in, like, why, why am I here? Why am I, what am I doing? I'm not even getting any pleasure, but here I am, like a, you know, rat pressing a lever. Well, that's, the dopamine system has been depleted. And so what you need is some time away from it, could be 10 minutes, could be 10 days. And then it feels good again. True for relationships, true for exercise, you know, I believe in training hard and training often. But if you train too hard, too often, you can't bring the intensity that you need to get the stimulus to adapt. And pretty soon you're either plateauing or you're getting worse.

• 2:20:28Jocko Willink?

  Here's a experiment I did with myself.

• 2:20:33Jocko Willink?

  I went in my ice bath and I, I had my phone, I was, for whatever reason, I like wanted to see something on social media, on Instagram. So I was like, I'm just gonna look at, I want to waste some time. So I'm just gonna, while I'm sitting in the ice bath for, you know, five minutes, I'm gonna look at it, look at social media. So I got, I'm, I'm on Instagram in my ice bath. And normally you're in your ice bath and you're like, how long I've been in here for? You don't really want to look at your watch, you know, it's like, if I'm going to torture someone when they're in my ice bath, I'm like, you've been in for 30 seconds. That's 37 seconds. That's, so I'm going to tell them every increment of time because you're not going to let it all blur together. So, you know, I always hold off on looking at my watch, you know, when I'm in there, I'm just gonna wait, you know, because it's not going to be as long as you thought it was.

• 2:21:17Jocko Willink?

  So I'm in that mode, I'm looking at Instagram, so my hands aren't in it, but still, it's like, I'm, I'm looking at Instagram. And I go, how long has it been? It's probably been, it's probably been at least, I'm probably at the three minute mark right now. I roll over, look at my watch, I'm at like 5:20. So I got that way. That's how people look at their freaking screen. And all of a sudden they look up and they've wasted 28 minutes on there. Cause I mean, I was in it in cold water, you know? And time went by a little bit quicker. Imagine if you were sitting in a relaxing chair or whatever, you know? That stuff's gonna slip by you and, and next thing you know, you've been looking at your phone for 22 minutes. Or a half an hour. You know, you can write 500 words for a book in a half an hour.

• 2:22:02Jocko Willink?

  You know, like you can do, you can do a lot of things in a half an hour. That are going to benefit you as a human being. Instagram isn't one of them.

• 2:22:10Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:22:10Jocko Willink?

  The algorithm's gonna get you.

• 2:22:12Speaker 01

  That's right. It's gonna get you and, and if you want to create content, you build the raw materials. You, you find and build on the raw materials for that content away from the place where you distribute that content. I always tell myself that I love reading scientific papers and books, but Instagram can draw me in too. And I would say the, the gems exist outside of social media and I want to bring those to the podcast into social media. So the deeper I can read into the library or to these papers, the more that I can bring. You, I'm glad you brought up time perception because dopamine and serotonin and the states they are associated with. So broadly speaking, dopamine and adrenaline or serotonin and oxytocin are associated with different perceptions of time.

• 2:22:54Speaker 01

  Here's the best way to think about this is if you've ever had a day that was really exciting. Or I think to an op that was particularly exciting or difficult or challenging, required a lot of focus. It's amazing how quickly you perceive that day going by. But then when you look back on it, it feels like so much happened. Now think about waiting in the doctor's office.

• 2:23:20Speaker 01

  It feels like it goes on forever. And yet you look back on it and it feels like nothing happened. Dopamine and adrenaline change our perception of time. We've micro sliced time, but it seems like everything goes by really fast. And then when we look back, like we did this and then we did that and we did that thing. When you're a 10 year old and it's your birthday, so much happened, so much dopamine. Then think about the most boring phase of doing nothing. And you look back, nothing happened. Why? It's all about how these neuromodulators shift our perception of time, our gaze and our understanding of the outside world and so on. So you can imagine that if you're on Instagram and you're scrolling and scrolling and not a whole lot is happening and you go, oh my God, time, all this time went by, but nothing

• 2:24:05Speaker 01

  happened. Well, you're not in a high dopamine state. When you're in a high dopamine state, you will know because life feels exciting. You'll almost feel a readiness in your nervous system because, you know, some people will even tremble a little bit. That's the readiness for action because again, these are generic molecules. They didn't evolve for social media or for gunfights or for rolling jujitsu or for taking final exams or studying for them. They evolved to either put us into states of readiness and pursuit or relaxation. And so, once you understand that we all have both systems in us, but that some people, the seesaw is just naturally tilted a little bit toward one side or the other, excuse me, then you're in a position of really control it as opposed to it controlling you.

• 2:24:50Speaker 01

  And there's a term that I like to use when thinking about this. We all think about stress, but really there are two kinds of stress. There's the, I'm too activated, I'm too alert and I need to calm down. And then there's the, I'm too calm and I need to lean into action. And I refer to this as limbic friction. Your limbic system controls these very basic states of being alert or being stressed or being calm. But your forebrain, this incredible real estate just behind your forehead.

• 2:25:22Speaker 01

  Is what controls what we call top down modulation. It's the look at the watch, oh, it's 4:45. Jaco is already up. Like I need to do this, but wait, hold on. If I get into action, adrenaline would come. Thoughts actually allow us to overcome our limbic tendency to just want to go back to sleep. Or if I'm very, very stressed, I can quickly calm down. I can just pass along. There's actually a physiological tool to calm down. Wasn't discovered by me. It was discovered in the 1930s. There's a pattern of breathing that every person and every mammal does. When carbon dioxide builds up too much in the bloodstream and it's called a physiological sigh. This is two inhales through your nose.

• 2:26:01Speaker 01

  And then a long, full exhale. Looks crazy, but believe it or not, we all do this once every five minutes or so.

• 2:26:06Jocko Willink?

  This podcast is like the documentation of the release of that. Cause I, I, I'll be reading something just super stressful or even talking to someone that, you know, was in a terrible situation. You can go, go listen to these podcasts and you'll hear like just silence and you'll hear me go.

• 2:26:27Jocko Willink?

  Like it's so obvious that I do that to release the, the stress that I have from, you know, listening to someone or, or dragging some horrible story out of someone.

• 2:26:38Speaker 01

  Exhales, slow the heart down. Inhale, speed the heart up. There's something called respiratory sinus arrhythmia. So for when you inhale, basically what happens is your diaphragm moves down. Right? It actually moves down. There's actually more space in your, the cavity that your heart sits in. Blood flows more slowly through that larger volume. Heart got a little bigger. The brain sends a signal, speed the heart up. When you exhale, that diaphragm moves up. Heart gets a little smaller. Blood moves more quickly through that smaller space. Brain sends a signal to slow the heart down. If you increase the duration or the intensity of exhales relative to inhales, you'll calm down. Increase the intensity or the duration of inhales relative to exhales. You will become more alert through these brain stem centers that were not discovered by me,

• 2:27:21Speaker 01

  but by this brilliant guy at UCLA named Jack Feldman, who found the two brain areas that are responsible for this physiological size reopen all the small sacs in the lungs so that you can then offload the maximum amount of carbon dioxide when you exhale. So the big, deep inhale through the nose and then squeeze in a little bit more air, re-inflates the little sacs in the lungs and allows you to offload carbon dioxide on the long exhale that follows. You do this in sleep. People who have apnea don't do this well. Apnea is very dangerous. It actually will shorten your life, lead to all sorts of issues. Not good. People will use the CPAP, or they'll learn to mouth breathe, or do these kinds of things. You can also use physiological sighs between rounds of jujitsu to calm down if you want to calm down. Or you can do more inhales if you want to ramp up.

• 2:28:05Speaker 01

  I mean, fighters know this stuff intuitively, and they know how to use breath. But none of these are hacks. These are defined circuits that we all come into the world with. And the reason I say they're not hacks is they work the first time, and they work every time. Because guess what? You're using them all the time anyway. We're just not normally aware. And so you can, when you're speaking a lot, oftentimes you'll feel stressed because you're not taking a few moments to do these double inhales and exhales, as I'm doing now. But if you're having trouble sleeping, do some long exhale breathing. You'll notice you'll calm down. So I call these real-time tools because they don't involve stepping away from what you're doing. The other cool thing about the physiological sigh is that the nerve that controls the diaphragm is called the phrenic nerve.

• 2:28:46Speaker 01

  And it has a little branch, we call this a collateral, that goes to the liver and a few other organs. If you're ever running and you get that side stitch, you think it's a cramp? That is not a cramp. That has to do with your pattern of breathing and the movement of the diaphragm. And the phrenic nerve sometimes gets into a pattern of firing that's not quite optimal. You're getting what's called referred pain of the liver. And the pain inside the body is not as precise as it is on the surface of the body. What do you do? Well, we used to be told, oh, you run with your hands over your head, or you need more water. All you have to do is a few physiological sighs, and you'll reset the pattern of breathing to the correct motion. So the next time you have a side stitch or a cramp, just do a few double inhale exhales while running, and that referred pain will just disappear.

• 2:29:30Jocko Willink?

  So you mentioned the limbic system. So I'm sitting here, you're painting this picture when you're talking about serotonin, your testosterone, and dopamine. You get this picture in your head like, wow, every human being should just be running at this optimum thing, where, hey, I'm gonna go get some testosterone reward for my dopamine. And then when I'm done with that, I'm gonna go hug my kids. And it seems like we should be in this perfect cycle of where everything is great, because we're either in pursuit, or we're in gratitude, and this is great. Unfortunately, we all know that that's not the reality and people end up in this weird thing where they don't go in in pursuit. As a matter of fact, they they don't go in pursuit

• 2:30:12Jocko Willink?

  at all. They don't even get off the couch. We we have people that don't appreciate what they've got. And so so is that the limit? What is the opposing force to these two totally positive things that we've got out there of, hey, I've got this dopamine reward system. When I go out, I'm gonna do some squats. I'm gonna feel great when I get done. I'm gonna see my dog. I'm gonna pet him. I'm gonna feel great. Like, life is great. What is the opposing force on these things that trips us up?

• 2:30:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, very important question. And fortunately, or unfortunately, we have an answer, which is that we can now access dopamine release without any effort at all. High flavor, high calorie density food, right? It's probably rare in nature at one point. We had to work hard in order to get game, get grains, get berries. So it was, it used to be effort, dopamine, relaxation, repeat. Now you can get enough dopamine from food. Remember the rat just sitting there? Doesn't it? It won't cross the cage, because it has no dopamine. But most people are like the rat just sitting there, just popping.

• 2:31:23Jocko Willink?

  Just on the couch.

• 2:31:24Speaker 01

  I saw this on the plane, and I'm not being disparaging of anybody, but I sat down next to this person. And it was, and I was, I was not shocked. I was actually just really dismayed. This person was sitting there, kind of like hooded eyes. I don't think they had been drinking alcohol. Didn't smell like it. Just popping Cheetos into their mouth like a rat, just feeding from a dispenser, just the whole time, just passively, right? So you're getting this low level of dopamine, lots of calories, lots of, with no activity. Yes, their phenotype, as we'd say in biology, was as you would predict. And it was just really sad. There was no, there was, I think that when it's it's fair to say that dope, high levels of dopamine achieved without effort will destroy a person.

• 2:32:09Speaker 01

  Whether or not that comes through a high potency drug or a high potency food, if it comes with an intensity and a frequency that's too high that doesn't require effort, it will destroy a person.

• 2:32:19Jocko Willink?

  So what else is there? There's food, we can get a dopamine hit from Cheetos.

• 2:32:24Speaker 01

  Anything pleasurable.

• 2:32:25Jocko Willink?

  TV?

• 2:32:26Speaker 01

  Extremely pleasurable, yes, I would say.

• 2:32:28Jocko Willink?

  Does TV work?

• 2:32:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, I would say, here I'm borrowing from Anna Lemke's work. She's, again, a medical doctor who focuses on dopamine and addiction, but also behaviors that relate to addiction. Video game addiction, for instance. Social media or YouTube addiction. I can give you one very salient example of this. When we're getting, you know, let's say the dopamine, it doesn't work, actually work this way, but let's just say with arbitrary units can be released at anywhere from zero to 100 level. Let's say methamphetamine is 100 because we know it does evoke a lot of dopamine release. Let's say a nice pizza after a good, long run is 20.

• 2:33:04Jocko Willink?

  What about a nice pizza after watching a Netflix show?

• 2:33:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:33:08Jocko Willink?

  Is that, I'm saying, is that, is that also gonna be a 20 or is that only a 10? Because you didn't really earn it?

• 2:33:15Speaker 01

  Ah, well, it can be very pleasurable, but what's gonna happen is that you're still getting dopamine and it's incremental, right? Remember I said earlier stacking dopamine is dangerous? It's not that you have one reservoir or one kind of hydraulic system putting a pressure for dopamine and then you spend it all and it comes back. You have multiple things. So if you're listening to music and you're eating and you're having a good time, that's great, I mean, that's life. I mean, we want to encourage people not to be total stoics and they want to enjoy life. But what's gonna end up happening if you're just sitting there eating high calorie food, taking in a lot of sensory information that has you really wrapped with attention, there's really no incentive to be motivated to do anything else at a biological level. So then someone, in fact, I was talking to my podcast producer,

• 2:33:58Speaker 01

  he had a friend in college that was a spectacular student early on and got really into video games. And there came the day to move out of their house. And everyone was packing up and moving out and this guy didn't have his stuff together. And the trucks were literally coming. It's like, and they realized he actually can't do anything. He's only seems to be getting his dopamine from this one behavior. I have a close friend whose son... Graduated from high school, was going to community college, and pretty soon developed what he thought was a case of pretty severe ADHD and depression. Obviously, that can happen. Young guy, I've known him. He's always been a swimmer and an athlete. Very impressive kid, good-looking kid, always very sociable. And pretty soon, he wasn't going to his community college classes. He wasn't working, no relationship,

• 2:34:43Speaker 01

  living at home with the parents. This is what they call failure to launch. Right? Pretty scary at 20, much scarier at 25. He heard on a Lembke talk to on a different podcast about the dopamine system, and he realized that he's spending all his time on YouTube, video games. He got a little bit into crypto and was kind of dabbling there, nothing. And he went on a complete fast of all these things. And I'm pleased to say that he's complete now, he's now lives with his girlfriend, he's got a job, he's completely off any ADHD meds. And I realize some people do need these ADHD meds. Guess what ADHD meds are? Ritalin, Adderall, Vyvanse, they all trigger the release of dopamine. It's a way of getting dopamine, and some people really need that. But you can imagine if you're getting it from all these sensory stimuli,

• 2:35:29Speaker 01

  YouTube, etc. And listen, I love YouTube, I appreciate them, but you, it's a potent stimulus. You can find pretty much anything on there.

• 2:35:36Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:36Speaker 01

  And so the key, you asked, why are we so off balance? Why can't we just do this naturally? Is because naturally, we just want pleasure. We really do, as a species, just seek pleasure and avoid pain. All species do that. And now it takes a very deliberate, four-brain oriented person, who really actually associates their value and their self-image with effort and reward, not just reward, to get through this jungle of, you know, plants that can basically just grab us and pull us down. And we see it everywhere, and it should not surprise us at all. And so is the key to completely discard with any pleasures? No. The key is put effort in front of pleasure,

• 2:36:21Speaker 01

  and you will have a, and learn how to relax and access these other systems of serotonin, etc., and appreciation. And if you can do that, you can completely control the trajectory of your life. But pleasure without effort preceding it is absolutely deadly.

• 2:36:39Jocko Willink?

  It's uh, you clued me in on this one echo of variable rewards. So like even when you're looking at uh YouTube, right? And you click on a video and it looks good. It's got a good thumbnail, right? It's good.

• 2:36:54Speaker 01

  Big eyes. They told us, you know, thumbnails with with crazy eyes actually get more clicks.

• 2:36:59Jocko Willink?

  Okay, so there you go. So you get lured in on that, but it's not quite as good as you want. So then, but you see another one and so you click on that one and it's not quite as good. But then you click on one. It's all this pretty good, you know, it had a good freaking car crash in it or whatever it is that you wanted to see. And so then you get that variable reward in Instagram, you get it in YouTube and and and where it's like you get a little spike like, oh, there it is. That that was a really good meme or whatever. That one made me laugh, you know? You have to look at seven memes that are dumb. And then you see a good one and then you go, well, maybe the next one will be good too. And you want that little hit. It's freaking disturbing.

• 2:37:39Speaker 02

  Has to do with anticipation, right? Or something like that?

• 2:37:42Speaker 01

  Yes, you guys are are teaming me up with the exact language. So the best schedule for maintaining motivation over time is called random intermittent reinforcement. This is what the slot machines do. This is gambling. The reason people go to Vegas, go, I like it to do a little bit of gambling. I like to sit there. I like the dumb gambling. I like roulette. I just like to sit there and watch the wheel go. I don't like to have to think too hard or look at the cards or anything and just put things on numbers. Eventually you get something and go, you know, sometimes I win, sometimes I lose, but it's always a set amount. Why do I like this? Well, it's boring, boring, uh, and then boom, you hit. You hit, you get eighteen to one on something. That's random intermittent reinforcement is the most powerful reinforcement schedule

• 2:38:25Speaker 01

  in all species for all things. Some people even

• 2:38:29Jocko Willink?

  All species, all things.

• 2:38:31Speaker 01

  All species.

• 2:38:32Jocko Willink?

  Random.

• 2:38:33Speaker 01

  All mammalian species.

• 2:38:34Jocko Willink?

  Intermittent reward.

• 2:38:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, give a rat a reward for pressing a lever. Every time it actually will press that lever less often, it'll get its dopamine fix. Right? It's the person next to me eating Cheetos on the plane. They'll keep doing it, but not with this. They won't work to do it. Whereas if you give it to them every fifth time, animals and people learn intuitively. They're not necessarily even counting. They just know how fast they need to press before they get it again. Random intermittent reinforcement means if you're not expecting a reward, you get more dopamine. So you said anticipation. So there's something in the dopamine literature. That is called reward prediction error. If you anticipate a reward and it comes, you get some dopamine.

• 2:39:17Speaker 01

  If you don't anticipate a reward and it comes, you get even more dopamine from the same reward. And if you anticipate a reward and it doesn't come, guess what? Dopamine drops below baseline. Hey kids, we're gonna go get ice cream. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You get to the ice cream shop, closed. Ooh, not good. You crash them below. Now you're negotiating trips to Disneyland, right? If you are walking by an ice cream shop, you turn to them and you say, ice cream? Bigger dopamine release from the actual ice cream. This is a very powerful modulator of our behavior. So anticipation is key because remember, dopamine isn't about the pleasure. Dopamine is about the anticipation of pleasure. And this, there are beautiful experiments. If people want to learn more about this, just put reward prediction error.

• 2:40:01Speaker 01

  The guy Wolfram Schultz, uh, yes, um, was the guy who, over in Germany, who discovered a reward prediction error. He found that the neurons in the brain that control dopamine release are firing before you get the reward. Then you get the reward and it goes up a little bit and then it drops. And that drop is the pain that you feel afterwards. Why? To keep animals and humans motivated to go pursue more. And a lot of our behavior can be understood through reward prediction error. This also pertains, again, human relationships. Don't tell somebody a restaurant is so incredible or a blank is so incredible. Don't build yourself up to be so incredible if you want to actually be experienced as that incredible. Anticipation is wonderful, but then you better bring it.

• 2:40:42Speaker 01

  Because if you don't, you are going to sink dopamine way lower than you would have otherwise. So surprise is one of the wonderful elements of the dopamine circuitry. And if you think about an animal foraging for food or a human foraging for food, this is what led to people, you know, looking for game to kill. Well, you're a hunter, right? Maybe you're a hunter as well. I've done a hunting, but I've done some fishing and you're kind of like, oh, this.

• 2:41:04Jocko Willink?

  He hunts at Vons, pretty much.

• 2:41:06Speaker 01

  But I'm good though.

• 2:41:07Jocko Willink?

  He's pretty good at it.

• 2:41:08Speaker 01

  What do you hunt for? Just kidding.

• 2:41:10Jocko Willink?

  And it's a real stretch to call me a hunter. I got into hunting a few years ago and have been going hunting each year. And, uh, very, very cool, very, um, very rewarding, uh, very difficult, very, very rewarding.

• 2:41:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's um, you know, because that's a very dynamic system as are gunfights and whatnot. It's not just about hitting targets on a range. Obviously, the other person or the animal gets a vote too. And so that's that we we crave that as human beings and combat taps into that. And basic mating interactions and the things that lead up to that. You know, the the dance that is human evolution of of mating and aggression and all these other things. Uh, you know, all tap into the dopamine system and we experience wins. And then we try and make predictions about where we will experience wins again, based on our previous history. And yet, what keeps us?

• 2:42:04Speaker 01

  It would be so boring if you always knew the deer was going to be standing right next to that tree, looking at you. Right? One reason I like Cam Haynes's videos and I watch those is I love the unpredictability of it. I'm also always amazed at how many objects are in front of them and obviously a very skilled hunter. So it's the uncertainty that that certainly people in special operations, you know, it's it's defined by uncertainty. The rules are set and yet there's this huge set of variables for which you need to be able to adapt in real time. That's going to lead to more dopamine increase than anything else.

• 2:42:37Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, uh, it's it's interesting because the the hunting thing, like, how does it compare to combat? I've had guys ask me that and there's a really big difference is that that, you know, that thing's not going to shoot back at you. But if you go and hunt like a grizzly bear with a bow and arrow and you mess up, that thing absolutely will kill you. So that does go, that does get very close to the the same kind of scenario that you're dealing with. And I'm sure the dopamine hit, and I haven't hunted hunted any bear yet, but that's got to be a next level.

• 2:43:14Speaker 01

  Absolutely. I mean, I remember backpacking in Glacier and running into a bear cub pop, you know, eating berries on the trail. We took the bear bell off. You know, those bear bells are really annoying. And the whole time we're walking with these bear bells, I'm like, let's take these bear bells off. Ignore the red, you know. And we're hiking out and sure enough, there's a bear cub sitting there and you go, oh, at first you go, bear cub. And then you go, bear cub. So absolutely, there's, you know, these systems again are oriented toward our survival, our reproduction, our drive. When we meet people that are very driven, typically it's because they have systems like yourself, like yourself. I mean, and these systems almost

• 2:43:54Speaker 01

  always are designed to overcome what I referred to earlier as limbic friction. It's rarely that someone has just a system of making everything easy that allows them to be continually motivated. I think this is one of the big misconceptions. People think, oh, and we've done episodes on the Huberman Lab Podcast, like workspace optimization. And I always sort of hesitate to do these episodes because it's true. If you put your computer screen up as opposed to looking down it, you'll be alert for longer because of what we were talking about before, eye positioning. If you have a standing desk, you'll probably be alert because standing actually, you know, and so on and so forth. But what you find is that people that display motivation

• 2:44:33Speaker 01

  over long periods of time have systems that put them into limbic friction and then overcome limbic friction again and again. Remember, effort then reward. And many people are looking for the tools, the hacks and the tricks that are going to take all the effort part out. What you do, what you want to do is build the effort and the limbic friction in and then the reward in on a consistent basis.

• 2:44:55Jocko Willink?

  Brief me again on the limbic friction.

• 2:44:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:44:58Jocko Willink?

  So where's that coming from?

• 2:45:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. So you have areas of the brain. In the old days, people used to call them ancient and then now people don't like that. But basically, there are parts of the brain that exist in humans and in other animals, like the hypothalamus, which is a cluster of neurons basically above the roof of your mouth, little tiny real estate within the nervous system, but controls things like. Motivation, aggression, rage, sex behavior, temperature. These are clusters of what we call nuclei, little clusters of neurons that control all these different primitive states. So much so that if I were to just tickle one of those with an electrode, I could put you into a rage state like that. There's a wonderful video if people want to see it. It's a little disturbing for people that can't handle this stuff from David Anderson's lab at Caltech.

• 2:45:42Speaker 01

  You can put Anderson Lab aggression mating into YouTube. Two mice, electrode in an area of the brain called the ventromedial hypothalamus. Stimulate one category of neurons in there using some neuroscience tricks and the animal immediately goes over and starts to mate with the female animal. Okay. Turn those neurons off. There are ways you can do this instantaneously and remotely. Turn on the neurons in the ventromedial hypothalamus that are distinct from those and the animal starts to kill the other animal. Put that animal alone in a cage with a glove filled with air. Stimulate these neurons. It tries to kill the glove. Looks like a kid at an agnostic front show is just swinging his arms like that, you know,

• 2:46:26Speaker 01

  just rage, although that's a controlled rage. So we have switches in the hypothalamus. Then we have this real estate that we call the prefrontal cortex, which is, controls rational decision making, has access to the hippocampus with information about the past, the present and the future. Right? When we're in states of rage, it's all about now. States of stress, it's all about now. States of fear, it's all about now. The prefrontal cortex can draw on a memory bank of experiences from the past, the present and future, for better or for worse, and say, uh-uh, the last time we tried to cross this bridge with our team, things didn't work out so well. Let's stop. Let's think. Or we're under attack. You immediately want to respond. What do you guys call it? Swift violent action.

• 2:47:11Speaker 01

  But sometimes I'm guessing there's a time to like regroup swift violent action in a more successful way. Okay, I'm just borrowing language from your community. That ability to tamp down basic physiological responses is controlled by the forebrain, suppressing the limbic pathways. So, there's a friction between our rational mind and these impulses. There's a famous case of the guy that was working on the railways, every psychology student learns about this.

• 2:47:40Jocko Willink?

  Spikes through.

• 2:47:40Speaker 01

  Spikes through his forebrain, it went through orbitofrontal cortex, it's prefrontal cortex. What happened? Well, the story goes that he became sort of inappropriate. So if he didn't like you, he'd tell you. "I don't like you." Swear at you. He went to church before, was a real good guy. After that, he was, you know, screaming at people and called profanities and things like that. There's a condition called Klüver-Busey syndrome, which relates to a different brain area, but also the forebrain, where animals or people will start to mate with inanimate objects. Right? This is inappropriate behavior, according to the limbic system, but they don't see as inappropriate because their forebrain is shut down. So limbic friction describes the tension in this neural circuitry between the forebrain and these reflexes.

• 2:48:22Speaker 01

  And remember, it has two sides. One is the ability to suppress action, and the other is the ability to engage action when you would otherwise want to be relaxed. And that's because some of the areas of the hypothalamus are involved in relaxation. So you want to stay in bed. I'll be honest, you know, for me, I hope for many people, there's a strong pull to stay under the covers and sleep longer, tell yourself that, you know, you heard on a podcast that sleep's important, you know, all this stuff. You die of dementia if you don't sleep enough. And you have to tell yourself, "No. No. It's the effort followed by the reward that I'll feel later. That's the ticket." And so that's an example of limbic friction that you overcome, where the forebrain takes over. Now you're in action. You're in forward center of mass. Or you're exhausted. So that's overcoming exhaustion, or...

• 2:49:07Jocko Willink?

  So the limbic system can screw you in both ways. It could screw me in, like, I lose my temper and I attack you and I end up going to jail because I stabbed you in the neck, because I lost my temper. It can also screw me by, hey, you know, you don't really don't feel like going to work out right now and you should just stay in bed because it's nice and comfortable in here.

• 2:49:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:49:31Jocko Willink?

  So your limbic system, yeah.

• 2:49:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:49:33Jocko Willink?

  Well, then you can rationalize that.

• 2:49:34Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 2:49:35Jocko Willink?

  End up there, but, but that's a limbic system driving me to just wanna stay in bed or wanna, hey, you know, this freaking, uh, uh, cotton candy tastes great and I should just eat more of it and just keep shoving it into my mouth.

• 2:49:47Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 2:49:48Jocko Willink?

  Limbic system in action.

• 2:49:49Speaker 01

  That's right. And a lot of treatments for phobias and anxiety disorders that are related to cognitive behavioral therapy are progressive exposure. So a person afraid of snakes, you give them a picture of a snake, then you have them imagine a snake, then they're looking at a rubber snake, then they're holding a snake. What are you doing? You're, you're allowing them to get into small incremental steps of forward action that get them closer and closer, but you're to the anxiety, but you're also ratcheting down the anxiety. What I'm talking about, and I think what the practices that you've talked a lot about really relate to is recognizing that friction of being tired, but knowing that you should get into action or that feeling of being too amped up and knowing you need to calm down means going against yourself in a way that is not incremental, sometimes can feel huge.

• 2:50:34Speaker 01

  This is why I think, you know, anyone who's gonna try an ice bath, don't freeze to death, but you know, start at 45 degrees and move your limbs around and experience what a lot of adrenaline is really like. And, you know, if you do it appropriately, you won't die and you will come out of there, you'll get that dopamine rush and the thing to think about is not how great it feels. You wanna think about how hard it is and then how great it feels. Those two things need to be coupled in one's mind and the power of mindset is something that has been talked about all the time, the secret or on, you know, in social media. But I have a colleague at Stanford, seems like I only refer to experiments at Stanford, but hey, it's a good place. If there is an analog to the SEAL Teams and academia, can we borrow that? Sorry. Um, there are other good places too.

• 2:51:18Speaker 01

  There's some schools on the east coast I hear as well. The, um, I'm just kidding, but I do bat for the home team, but they're, they're experiments elsewhere, of course, but my colleague, Ali Crum.

• 2:51:29Speaker 01

  Her name is Aleah, but she goes by Ally Cromer. She's a professor of psychology, tenured professor of psychology, former Division One athlete, trained clinical psychologist, and actually, her dad is a martial artist and has done some work with your community. Incred-- and she has a few papers on SEALs, and I'll explain what those are. She studies mindsets and the power of mindset, and she studies the physiology. So, none of this stuff is wishy-washy. And here's the interesting thing. You take two groups of people. She's taken two groups of people. One group watches a movie about stress, the other group watches a movie about stress. The first group watches a movie about stress and learns all the true information about stress disrupts your memory, it causes deficiencies in decision-making, and blah, blah, blah,

• 2:52:13Speaker 01

  all the terrible things that stress can do. The other group learns all the positive things that stress can do. Can activate your immune system, can sharpen your focus, can enhance your memory if it's done in the appropriate way, et cetera. Then you test people with a number of things, like memory tests. You test their immune system. You do blood draws. You look at how much stress hormone they're making. Guess what? Whatever you learned and believed, that's what happens. They've done the same experiment with two milkshakes. Okay? You give one group a milkshake. You tell them, "This is a high-calorie, high-fat, high-sugar milkshake. There's lots of nutrients in it." You give the other group a milkshake. You say, "This is a modest to low-calorie milkshake." Then you have them drink the milkshake. You take blood draws and you look at the insulin response.

• 2:52:58Speaker 01

  You look at the amount of ghrelin, which is a hunger-- a hormone that's secreted in response to hunger, it makes you hungry, basically. And guess what? It's the same milkshake, and yet you get higher insulin response to the high-calorie-- the thought that it's a high-calorie shake. You get lower insulin. Oh, you still get an insulin response in response to the idea that it's a lower-calorie shake. The ghrelin response is suppressed, so you get-- your hunger doesn't show up for longer if you have the so-called high-calorie shake. Staves off hunger. Whereas if you had the low-calorie shake, you're hungry again earlier, and ghrelin levels go back up, really. All based on belief. And there are numerous things like this. And so Ally's words are the best words for this, and I'm probably not going to get them exactly right, but--

• 2:53:42Speaker 01

  What we do and the physiological consequences of what we do is the consequence of what we do, what we eat, how we exercise, but also what we believe about what we do. Now, this does not mean that you can just lie to yourself. You can't say, "Oh, this, you know, you know, four by four from In-N-Out is only a hamburger, and it's not gonna have a big insulin." That doesn't work. But what you can do is-

• 2:54:05Jocko Willink?

  What if you eat a protein style?

• 2:54:07Speaker 01

  It's pretty good. Where there's the Flying Dutchman, I've heard. Do you know that one?

• 2:54:10Jocko Willink?

  I haven't had the Flying Dutchman.

• 2:54:11Speaker 01

  I think that's just meat on a piece of paper.

• 2:54:13Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 2:54:14Speaker 01

  So now all those carnivores are gonna be, you know, going through. That's what I'd give Costello, my bulldog. Um, I think they still use that. The off-the-menu menu. So basically, if you tell yourself, "The friction that I'm feeling of not wanting to get out of bed, and the reward I will feel later actually is building a system within me," and that is a true statement, you will build that system within you. If you believe, "This is just overcoming pain so that I can drop those pounds, so that I don't have to feel terrible about myself," well, you won't build that system. And this is the beauty and the mystery of the brain, which is that the forebrain can draw on all these contextual things. You can really give meaning to what would otherwise just be basic limbic experiences.

• 2:54:57Speaker 01

  Now, there aren't an infinite range of ways to do this. I can't cut myself with this little, you know, butter knife here and say, "Just kidding," because I can't cut myself with this dagger that my fingers barely fill, by the way. Someone's got some big mitts. I can't put it through my hand and tell myself I didn't do that, right? There are limits to this. The laws of physics still apply. The laws of physiology still apply. But as we learn from the example of the milkshakes, or the example about stress, positive or negative learnings about stress, there is a range of physiologies that we can experience according to something. I think this has important implications, too, for things like PTSD. Interpreting the experiences of past. Just telling oneself, "Oh, it wasn't that big of a deal," won't work.

• 2:55:41Speaker 01

  But telling oneself that there's no way to come back from that also is not true.

• 2:55:46Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:55:49Jocko Willink?

  There's a couple of things that I've been, I've been talking about for a while. The, the, the one I'm gonna start with is this idea. I've been telling people for a while, hey, listen, you got tendencies. So we, so we all have different tendencies. You might have a tendency, let's say from a leadership perspective, that you're a micromanager. And you've got to be aware of that tendency because if you don't, if you're not aware of it and you don't try and counter it, you're gonna always end up micromanaging. Maybe you have a, a tendency to be hyper aggressive and you're too aggressive and you go and make, you, you try to run to the sound of the guns without really taking a step back. So you have to understand what your tendencies are. And then you've got to say, my tendency also might be right. So now I'm thinking about this from, and, and I also say, hey, listen, as a leader,

• 2:56:33Jocko Willink?

  you gotta watch the crowd and you gotta pay attention to make sure that the crowd is going in the right direction. When the crowd starts to get fired up about something like, yeah, we need to go assault that building. We need to go assault that building. You should say to yourself, you should think to yourself the contrary. You should think, okay, what, wait a second, is that the right thing to do right now? Cause it's really easy to get caught up in the crowd. And it's now I'm noticing a similar thing with our limbic system. Like there's a chance that your limbic system is correct. Absolutely. But you need to be aware of the tendency of your limbic system and make sure that what that freaking little tiny part of your animal brain is thinking, you need to put it in check. And sometimes you go, yep, it's the right thing to do right now. I should get aggressive. I should go on the attack.

• 2:57:15Jocko Willink?

  But you need to run it through that check first. The other thing is when you're talking about milkshakes and what, what your attitude is, I mean, this is just, this is just so clear. When you, you know, from a leadership perspective, if we get told, hey, we gotta go freaking do this, this mission. And it's gonna be a real, you know, a real tough mission. It's gonna be, the weather's horrible. And, and that's how you bring it to the boys. Hey guys, we got tasked with this mission. It's gonna be freaking horrible. The weather's gonna be bad. We're gonna be freezing. If that's how you bring it to the boys, that, that's gonna be the attitude all day long. If you come down and you say, hey, listen, check this out. There's a mission coming down. It looks like, it looks like it's a very tough situation. They know that we're the only ones that can probably be able to get this done.

• 2:58:00Jocko Willink?

  We're gonna have this opportunity to go out there and get this, get this mission done. It's gonna be hard, but it's gonna have a big impact. Attitude's a hundred, 180 out, right? So we have so much control just by what we're thinking. And then if you're in a leadership position, the way you present things. It it it's gonna it's gonna sway the way people think. Now, I'll also tell you this. If you get told to do something horrible and you truly believe it's horrible and you go down and say, hey, guys, this is gonna be if you basically lie to them. They're gonna all know that you're lying. Like you can't fool you. It's very difficult to fool a group of people into, you know, positive thinking or what's the the secret of the secret book, right? That's where it's like, hey, it's all coming out. It's very hard to fool someone into that.

• 2:58:45Jocko Willink?

  But if you believe, hey, this is what we're doing. This is huge opportunity. This can be a tough mission, but it's gonna be worthwhile. If that's what you believe. Other people are gonna get on board with that and you really are gonna have a totally different attitude going into it.

• 2:59:00Jocko Willink?

  As far as the uh, the PTSD thing, you know, one, I don't know when I heard this. But this impacted my whole, my whole thoughts on war.

• 2:59:13Jocko Willink?

  It was, I I wanna say it might have been Bob Dole. You know, Bob Dole was a World War II guy who's wounded, you know, he never had um, uh, I think one of his hands didn't work very well. But I remember hearing him say, and I'm pretty sure it was him, please don't, I'm I'm sorry if I'm if I'm getting some getting this wrong, but. He said, simply put, he said, war made me better.

• 2:59:39Jocko Willink?

  And that is the 180 out of what a lot of guys get told right now. War is gonna make you crazy. It's gonna make you depressed. It's gonna make you an adrenaline junkie. It won't be any way to satisfy. And guys hear that and you're gonna have a hard time adjusting. And we're gonna have to try and assimilate you back into society because it's gonna be so hard because of what you've seen. Whereas Bob Dole or whoever this veteran was like, oh, war's gonna make me better. And I always, I've used that myself. I've used that when people have said to me, well, I know. Do you feel was it hard for you to say when you look back and you've seen you've lost friends? It's like, no. All that stuff. Look, it was horrible.

• 3:00:18Jocko Willink?

  But my perspective is better. I appreciate life more because I know that life can be lost very easily. I appreciate freedom more because I know the price that was paid for it. It didn't make me worse. It actually made me better. So I think we have to be careful of that kind of thing. And you can also then go down the whole road of like a social contagion where you've got people reinforcing behaviors or reinforcing mindsets and it starts to spread where now everybody's thinking, well, you know, if you went to war, you must be messed up. And then I think, well, if I went to war, I guess I must be messed up because that's what that's what we're doing. And this goes across the board with, you know, you mentioned the one guy earlier that was cutting the bottom of his feet, right? And you hear these horrible stories. That's a

• 3:01:00Jocko Willink?

  social contagion where these outbreaks of of girls, primarily girls, you know, 12 to 16 years old, would be cutting themselves. And it's something that would, oh, that's what we're doing. It was kind of this, these things would spread. And, you know, we talked about on one of our other podcasts, I think it was bulimia, right? That started, a guy wrote an article about it. There had been some small number of cases ever.

• 3:01:28Speaker 01

  Oh, right. I heard about this a little while.

• 3:01:29Jocko Willink?

  And then he, he wrote an article about it. And this is, I want to say in the 70s, maybe? And all of a sudden, they have tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of cases because people said, oh, they, they get this idea. And look, it is a real thing. And then he was reporting or, you know, documenting people this really happened to. But once people got that idea, it was like, oh, that's what we're doing. And you see this with a lot of, a lot of strange things that are spreading right now in, in, in America and worldwide where you go, hey, that's, that didn't, that wasn't a thing not too long ago.

• 3:02:04Speaker 01

  Right.

• 3:02:04Jocko Willink?

  That wasn't a thing not too long ago. And now it is.

• 3:02:08Speaker 01

  A couple of reflections, some that pertain specifically to SEAL teams, but what you're referring to is the fact that nervous systems are profoundly impacting each other. So your example of the group is getting really ramped up, we want to fight, let's go, you know, swift violent action now, and you're stepping back as the leader and saying, wait, you're effectively acting as the forebrain over a group that's effectively acting as a limbic system.

• 3:02:31Jocko Willink?

  That's exactly what I was trying to say.

• 3:02:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, and so nervous systems can be studied in isolation or in groups. It's harder to do that in the laboratory, although there are people that are starting to put two people into a scanner and having them interact and seeing how the brain areas interact. It's harder to do for obvious reasons. Alei Crumb's group actually did a study which simply asked, "Do you think stress harms you or grows you?" and measured physiologies, cortisol, et cetera. And there was only one group that, across the board, answered, "Stress grows you," and it was SEALs. So she's done work on military communities, and she's done work on civilians, and that's a published paper, you can find it on her website. She runs our Mind Body Lab

• 3:03:16Speaker 01

  at Stanford, really a brilliant person who, I think it's the experience that, the reason I listed off all her credentials, or some of her credentials of athlete, et cetera, is that she really understands the mind-body relationship from a first-person experience, not just a geek in a lab. You know, she's not a geek at all, actually, but very, very smart. The other thing is that, is this notion of social contagion, and we are profoundly influenced by sensory experience, and one of the most intense sensory experiences are the words and actions of others. Some people are drawn more toward, or are shifted more by other people's emotional states. We sometimes hold up empathy as this ideal, but empathy

• 3:03:59Speaker 01

  is very dangerous, because empathy for the wrong, in the wrong context, you know, your kid freaking out about an experience at school, if you freak out, if you experience true empathy, you abandon your own emotional state, you're not, that's not effective parenting or effective leadership. So empathy is wonderful, only insofar as it allows us to go in, understand, and then return to the context and make better decisions. And that's a complicated set of neural operations, but again, it all has to do with a confidence and a, an ability to leave your own emotional state, go in and... Be comfortable that you can get back out, right? So empathy is a razor, is a double sided blade, really.

• 3:04:42Jocko Willink?

  Interestingly, you know, I'll, I'll, I'll have the, the idea of empathy raised with me a lot through, through leadership, you know, isn't it important to be empathetic? And I've always made a distinction between, well, what I really want to do is I want to be better at understanding what your perspective is. So I want to truly understand what your perspective is, but I don't really want to actually feel what you're feeling because now I've, I might've messed up what I'm trying to, what, what my perspective is. And by the way, I want to get as many different perspectives as I can so that I can fully see the problem and understand it from the maximum number of angles. So now I can most easily find a solution. Whereas if I dive in to just looking and feeling the way you're feeling, that's not good. So.

• 3:05:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, you can both get drowned and, you know, can both drown. It's the jumping into the river to save somebody and you can both drown. I like this notion of perspective because inability to see throughout the lens of other people is extremely important, obviously, but the ability to return to one's own internal state is obviously the, the, one of the hallmarks of great leadership, as you know. The, the idea of groups and how to, how bad things spread between groups is that there's, there's, this will explain a lot of what we see on social media and in the press. There was a set of controversial, but nonetheless important experiments done in the 1960s by a guy named Robert Heath. So is that a time when you could sign up for an experiment and have electrodes put into your head and you could, for a nominal amount of money, you could stimulate the electrodes

• 3:06:10Speaker 01

  located at different locations and tell Dr. Robert Heath what you're experiencing. This is three papers, some of which were published in the journal Science, which is one of our kind of Super Bowl, we have the Super Bowl, NBA championship and, you know, Stanley Cup of Science, and they are Nature Science and Cell. Those are the three top journals. Science is a very good journal. He published this paper, basically subjects were allowed to stimulate a variety of different areas of their brain.

• 3:06:33Jocko Willink?

  In their own brain.

• 3:06:33Speaker 01

  In their own brain.

• 3:06:34Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 3:06:34Speaker 01

  Stimulate one area in the person that he'd say, what do you, what do you feel? And they'd say, a little drunk. Stimulate another area, what do you feel? Kind of giddy, what do you feel? A little bit of anger, et cetera. And then he would just tell people, you can stimulate any area that you want, but you have only 10 minutes to do it. So they'd play around on the keyboards, again, couldn't do this experiment now, but really cool experiment.

• 3:06:56Speaker 01

  The area that all the subjects chose to stimulate the most, far more, excuse me, than other areas, is an area of the midline thalamus, for what it's worth. And the subjective experience that they all reported, mild frustration and anger. What is going on here? Why would human beings want to feel frustration and anger? Well, it turns out that this medial thalamus area is linked up with the dopamine system. We may not like limbic friction of the sort, like overcoming fatigue to go exercise, or stress and needing to calm down, but human beings seem to love the feeling of being pissed off just a little bit.

• 3:07:38Speaker 01

  And I mention this not because I like this result, I kind of hate this result, but I guess that just speaks to the result itself, which is that there's something about it which feels motivating. Anger feels good at a low level because it puts us into a state of activation and we like states of activation and relaxation. And guess what? It puts us in a state of activation without us having to do anything. We're right back where we were before. Dopamine hits without any effort. Being angry is a dopamine hit without having to do anything. And people will sit there all day, and I confess there are times, you know, no one's ever put a negative comment on our comment in my Instagram, I'm just kidding, right? And you find, why do we orient to those? Well, we could say, oh, it hurts.

• 3:08:21Speaker 01

  Actually, frankly, unless it's a, you know, something I really need to pay attention to, I don't really care, right? Because typically they're of a, of a nature that's not really meaningful, that doesn't come from a place of understanding, or, you know, I don't like misunderstandings. I do read comments, but you want people to understand things. But when people are just mean spirited, we'll find ourselves orienting towards those because being mean, being a little angry turns out to be a dopamine hit. And I am, and I've become very conscious of this because I think social media is a place where we can all get drawn down these paths, where you can spend all day in a battle in your head. That doesn't mean anything, or worse, you can respond to things in a way that can sink

• 3:09:04Speaker 01

  your whole career. You see this. I mean, the chair of the psychiatry department at Columbia University was fired for a tweet that was just a very insensitive tweet. It wasn't an anger-based tweet, but that just tells me-

• 3:09:17Jocko Willink?

  What was the tweet?

• 3:09:19Speaker 01

  There was a picture of a, of a model, and he made a very insensitive remark about her genetic lineage. I just don't even want to bring it up. I don't want to restate it, because it's-

• 3:09:28Jocko Willink?

  How long ago was this?

• 3:09:29Speaker 01

  It was recently. People can Google it. I don't, I don't know what went through his mind, but here's what I know. This guy's a psychiatrist.

• 3:09:37Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:09:38Speaker 01

  He's one of the leading psychiatrists in the world, and he couldn't think two steps ahead, for whatever reason.

• 3:09:45Jocko Willink?

  You know, it's interesting. We've been given a, a hard time to, to Instagram a bunch today, but now you start talking about, now we're starting to talk about Twitter. Because it is crazy. It is crazy that there's people that are, you can see it when you read through what they're writing. They are feeling legitimate anger. Like, I, I'm like you. Like, I, I'll read something like, "Oh, it's kind of funny," whatever, you know? Even when people are saying-

• 3:10:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, a person feels powerless. I can see it. I, I see their comment, and I go, "Gosh, they must really feel powerless in this world," and I feel sad for them.

• 3:10:20Jocko Willink?

  But they are pissed. So they're getting a little dopamine hit by creating just friction and mayhem.

• 3:10:28Speaker 01

  And I think a lot of people show up, I hate to demonize Twitter, but I have to say, Instagram's a pretty kind place on average. I think there is a certain category of people that show up to Twitter to experience that form of dopamine hit. They are there to fight.

• 3:10:41Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:10:42Speaker 01

  But they're not there to fight outright. They're not going to meet you in the parking lot. They're not going to go toe-to-toe on a data point. They'd rather go through and kind of find little misunderstandings, and then hijack misunderstandings to try and elevate their status within this so-called fight. And if you think about the range of meaningless, circular, career- and life-diminishing behaviors, this would be at the to, near the top of the list. This is like the poor guy in the parking lot who's, you know, organizing leaves in the, in the corner, and you go, "He's lost his mind." You know, it's really sad. Except, these are people who arguably still have a mind to retrieve. So, th, this is, you know, who knows?

• 3:11:16Jocko Willink?

  Arguably.

• 3:11:17Speaker 01

  Arguably. So, you know, when I saw those Robert Heath results, I thought, "Gosh, people don't like to be angry. People don't like to be- pissed off and yet that low level anger and frustration has direct links to the reward pathway and I think we would all be wise to know when we're drifting toward that because we are all capi- if listen if this circuitry exists in us we're all capable of it I believe the Carl Jung statement even though I'm not a psychologist we have all things inside of us

• 3:11:43Jocko Willink?

  well i- it's also I'm sitting here painting myself very guilty because if you think about like listening to hardcore music this is this is music that is fueled by anger and fuels anger and it feels good like the first time I ever heard like the Cro-Mags I was like oh this is what I want to listen to now like this is it you know the first time you hear agnostic front you're like okay this is what I want to listen to now because you get that little you get that hit so that that got me hook line and sinker man

• 3:12:15Speaker 01

  but you channeled it into something so that's that's anger and dopamine without effort but then you took that and you applied it to something you listen to it while you train you orient towards a mindset you know I the examples are very nuanced and and particular to ourselves so they're not even worth sharing but there there are songs and things in my head that I hear that allow me to show up a better person and I I'm actually not the first to discuss this the great neurologist Oliver Sacks wrote about this you know he wrote the book awakenings and he wrote the man who mistook his wife for a hat he was looked at clinical abnormalities and taught people about how the brain works and based on how it breaks in these beautiful books but he was also held the California state record for back squat

• 3:13:00Jocko Willink?

  check respect I don't know about these books you're talking about whatever I don't know about these psychological things you're saying but record in back squat

• 3:13:08Speaker 01

  exactly yeah this is a guy who who was serious about his physical training he talked about this he talked about

• 3:13:16Speaker 01

  Anchoring to emotional states through, for him, listening to classical music, then being able to access creative works of writing, being able to listen to angry, he talked even about things that evoke anger, and then being able to take that anger and bring that to his ability to work very long hours in the clinic to help people that were on wards of hospitals that no one would dare go down, let alone go in there and help these people. These are just, imagine the worst place to ever be placed as a Parkinson's patient or an Alzheimer's. These are torture chambers that he would go into and he would take people out of the hospital. He did incredible humanitarian works. So he talked about channeling these, these reflexive tendencies toward good and toward building a career and a life. And so I think, listening to the Cro-Mags, if you, if you can put, you obviously put that into

• 3:14:00Speaker 01

  something useful. Just sitting there in your room and just listening over and over endlessly and not leaving and being angry at the world, or looking at what the Columbine kids did, just being pissed off at everybody, and then going and just, you know, hosing a cafeteria with bullets. Well, obviously, it can go either way. And so I think that learning to harness these more primitive states is very useful. We can't eliminate these states. We can't pretend they don't exist, but you can funnel them into real, not just benevolent, but really, human species growing actions.

• 3:14:31Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And I think it's, this is like another, just to bring up this word awareness again, we got some awareness now of the dopamine and what that crash is gonna feel like, and now we can start to put that into the calculus of how we're behaving. And now we're talking about the limbic system and understanding and being aware of what the limbic system is trying to do, and that it may or may not be leading you in the right direction, but you need to use your, your, your own brain to, to put that thing in check. And either go with it, or say, no, not right now. So, these things, to become aware of these things, very important. And, and, well, you said, this kind of thing has only been around for a, a, a limited amount of time. Most, you know, for most of human history, they've

• 3:15:16Jocko Willink?

  just been, it's just been, it's just been happening.

• 3:15:18Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, the, the effort to get the dopamine reward has been there. The, um, there was a time in which violent battle was adaptive, and there are still times where violent battle is adaptive, and then there are times when it'll completely sink your life. Right? I mean, I think that we are in a very important time right now where we can trigger activation of all these neural circuitries sitting at home. We don't even have to get out of bed. But we see, I think, the explosion of mental illness, the explosion of anxiety and depression and ADHD is absolutely the consequence of ready availability of pleasures without effort, lack of understanding about how our own basic physiology works. I have

• 3:16:00Speaker 01

  great respect for the fields of psychology, great respect. But thinking about your thinking is useful, but knowing that you can put a wedge in between your thinking and your physiology is also useful. Not better, but also useful. And so, for instance, if you're somebody who suffers from anxiety, practice physiological size, long exhales. If you're somebody who feels aim motivated, think about how much pleasure you're or sensory stuff and food and stuff you're consuming without effort first. Start to embrace this idea that effort followed by reward, repeat, effort, reward, repeat, is not, it's not just something that I'm saying. It's been the signature pattern of life progression in individuals. It's been

• 3:16:44Speaker 01

  the signature pattern of the evolution of our species. That was true a thousand years ago. That's true today, and it's likely going to be true a thousand years from now. I mean, I love the idea that companies like Neuralink and stuff are going to develop little devices. You just trigger your motivation circuitry. But guess what? Dopamine is a non-infinite but renewable resource. If you just dump all your dopamine because you stimulate with an electrode, you're, you can, we know this from experiments in the lab. You keep triggering those brain areas, you're not going to be a motivated person 24 hours a day. You're just going to deplete all your dopamine. So unless they have a plan to also put dopamine back in the system, mm-mm. There's no neurotechnologies that are going to overcome the technology of the brain completely. You can augment it, but you're not going to overcome it. You're

• 3:17:26Speaker 01

  not going to build a cyborg warrior that completely discards with the human element. Because everything that you've talked about in terms of leadership and self-control, all these forebrain circuits, and I've been describing the forebrain as one thing, like a brake on the limbic system or an accelerator on the limbic system. But it's really like spinning multiple plates. The ability to use your forebrain, it feels hard, feels like effort, even if you're just sitting in a chair, because You have to spin a plate over here and then you have to spin a plate over. You have to think, okay, those guys are gonna go there, then they're gonna arrive at this time, then I'm gonna arrive at this time. A lot of people just go, ah, they like overwhelmed. You have to calm yourself, as you know, and think, okay, then when they arrive and this.

• 3:18:05Jocko Willink?

  What are these plates that spin and give me a little bit?

• 3:18:07Speaker 01

  These are, think about the forebrain circuits as working in parallel. You don't have one forebrain, you have maybe five or six forebrain circuits. A simple operation would be lifting up this drink to drink it. A more complicated thing would be trying to think about doing this every time Echo puts his hand on his chin throughout the whole podcast while we're having a conversation. Now I have to spin multiple plates. I have to keep things going in real time. It's a trivial example because it's not important when he does that, but it allows me to demonstrate that we can contextualize anything. We can say, you know, every time that shadow moves to the left just a little bit, you know, did that shadow move? I don't know if that shadow moved. That's a lot of vigilance, but sure, you can occupy your whole forebrain with that, or you can do that while paying attention

• 3:18:49Speaker 01

  to how many guys are out on the ground or moving behind you. So your forebrain, it goes under high demand. When we sleep, we regain the capacity to do that multiple plate spinning type of operation. And when we go into non-sleep deep rest, when we turn off that effort, we reinstate that effort. I'll just mention one experiment there's done out of a lab in Scandinavia. They had people just lie down and do a yoga nidra type, or just you could go online and do NSDR, just do NSDR made for. It's a free script. You can listen to this, do it for 30 minutes. They found that when people do that sort of exercise of just deliberate decompression, not engaging their forebrain, doing long exhales, the amount of dopamine in a brain structure called the basal ganglia was replenished.

• 3:19:32Speaker 01

  That's very important. The basal ganglia are involved in directing go actions and no go. One way that people can get better at controlling their behavior and limbic friction is, I do this actually. I'm slightly embarrassed, but also proud to say 20 times a day, I find myself wanting to do something like pick up the phone. I've been wanting to pick up that little paper clip this whole podcast because I like it for reasons I don't understand, and not allowing myself to do it. For reasons that are trivial, but what am I doing? I'm engaging the no-go pathway.

• 3:20:02Speaker 01

  So try and learn to overcome limbic friction by forcing yourself to do things that you don't want to do. Try and force yourself to not do things that you want to do, even trivial things. And what you're doing is you're building up these little circuitries. And the basal ganglia depend on dopamine, different receptors for go and no go, but dopamine. The deep relaxation restores your ability to do this. Remember, non-infinite but renewable. So the more plate spinning, the more go no goes you perform throughout the day, the more you deplete the circuitry. Thirty minutes of a non-sleep deep rest, or a good night's sleep, whatever that means for you, reinstates those dopamine levels. So it's, at the end of the day, we're more than a bag of chemicals, but this stuff has been baked into us.

• 3:20:43Jocko Willink?

  So, check this out. Something I've been teaching a decent amount lately, and it just, it'll be very interesting to see how this overlays on your spinning plate. So, we, I've been, I've been trying to teach people, like I asked a question. I was up at a, at a, at an event, and at this event, some of my guys that worked for me in the SEAL teams were there, Leif Bab and Andrew Paul, and, and these guys happened to tell a couple of stories where like, oh, you know, Jaco did this, he made this decision right here, and it was great. And then, you know, Andrew got up and said, oh, this other time Jaco made, and so they painted me in great light, made me look really cool. And, you know, I was kind of, you know, my ego is inflating. And then during one of the breaks, a couple of the guys that were there, these are business guys, they came up, you know,

• 3:21:27Jocko Willink?

  said, yeah, you know, you, you have just such great instincts. It's so obvious, you know, as a leader, that you just have these great instincts. And I was kind of like, yeah, you know, it's pretty, I'm a, I'm really got really good instincts. And they kind of inflated my ego, and I felt great about myself. And then I went back, we were out the woods, and I went back to my, my little cabin. I started thinking to myself, wait a second. First of all,

• 3:21:52Jocko Willink?

  If, if the only thing I have is good leadership instincts and I'm just a good natural leader and that's what I have, what good is it to me to be able to talk to anyone else about it? If it's just something that I naturally have that no one else can have? That doesn't make any sense. And I said, and by the way, I know for a fact, I didn't always have these things. So then I started thinking about, well, how do I actually make decisions when I'm, I've got a bunch of chaotic things going on? And I sat down and I wrote down what I do in my brain when things are happening, when things are going on, when there's a, an enemy contact, when there's a, a, a problem out on the battlefield, or when there's a business problem, what am I doing? And I wrote down sort of these, these things that I think about.

• 3:22:33Jocko Willink?

  And, and I, I, I ended up saying, hey, this, we went back later that night and I said, hey, you guys asked me this question, asked me about my instinct. Well, let me tell you, it's not instinct. I am running a loop in my head to check that I am going in the right direction. Number one thing I always think about is time. How much time do I have right now? Something's going on and I have to make a decision. Do I have 20 minutes to make that decision? Do I have three minutes to make, do I have to make a decision right now? I think about the fundamental laws of combat that we talk about all the time, like, hey, are we going to support each other if I make this decision? If, is it going to help us as a team if I make this decision? Oh, and by the way, can I communicate it simply? Okay, if I can communicate it simply, great. Hey, where does this fall on our priority list?

• 3:23:18Jocko Willink?

  What, what number priority? Is this a higher priority that we, than we, what we've been doing? Do I need to shift priorities? Do I need to tell everyone to shift priorities? Or does this not fit the top priority? Decentralized command. Can I, can I get someone, can I delegate this problem to someone else? Can I, can I give it to them so that I can then look up and out? And I had this, so I went through this list of things. Hey, is this part of the mission that we're actually trying to do? Cause sometimes you're on a mission and you get distracted by something else and all of a sudden you get focused on that. You, you can't allow yourself to do that. And I, I had this whole list of things, of these thoughts that I will go through. And the most important thing, as I get done telling, explaining this list of things to people is, You can't get caught on any one of these things.

• 3:24:02Jocko Willink?

  If you get caught on the time factor, you'll never figure out if this is actually part of the mission. If you only focus on, hey, is this part of our mission? You might run out of time before you make a decision. So in my mind, when you talk about these spinning plates, I get it. And what I realize, and when you were talking about looking at a shadow and paying attention to it, you do have to pay attention to that. You have to check on it. But you can't forget about everything else that's going on. So this is an interesting dynamic. When I hear that my frontal lobe has these spinning plates, well, I know that I can't really pay attention to them all at the same time. So I have to kind of like check this one, give it a little spin, check this one, balance it, check this one, balance it.

• 3:24:46Jocko Willink?

  And if I get focused on one, another one's going to get dropped. So that's what I do is I go through and I look, okay, let me check this. Let me check this. Let me check this. And I keep going around in a circle in a loop. And this can all happen in a half a second. You can do all these things over and over again. But if you get stuck in one of these things, you're going to fall apart. And this goes back to, you ever heard of the OODA loop? Observe, orient, decide, and act. It's the same thing. You have to keep it moving. And if you get stuck on trying to decide what to do, if I can't make a decision, you're going to fall apart. If you get stuck in action, which some people think, oh, that'd be good. You're taking action. No, but if you are taking action, but you're not running the feedback and seeing how this action is affecting everything else that's happening around you, you have to do the action, then you have to go back and observe

• 3:25:31Jocko Willink?

  how it's impacting the scenario and then orient yourself to where you are now and then decide if that was a good action or not. So this idea of spinning plates is very interesting to me because they're out there. I know that there's times when I have all these plates spinning and I know that if I get focused on one of those spinning plates. The I'm gonna drop some other ones and then everything's gonna fall apart.

• 3:25:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's what the examples you provide are really key because first of all, it's high demand work. You know, one can get comfortable. What we're referring to as spinning plates. Some people experience overwhelm trying to do two things. You know, we so value this notion of focus and focus is wonderful, but we sometimes forget that the brain does not have one spotlight of focus. The way to think about focus is that we are old world primates and we can do something called covert attention. So I can talk to you, pay attention to you, but I can also pay attention to echo. I've got two spotlights. I can intensify a spotlight. I can start to pay attention to some specific feature of what you're saying or doing. And as I do that, he starts to disappear a little bit and then I can switch, right? These are

• 3:26:38Speaker 01

  the attentional mechanisms of the forebrain. If you want to play that game, I assure you, if we put you in a scanner, your prefrontal cortex will be lighting up like crazy, meaning high levels of metabolic activity there. I can also take those two spotlights and merge them to a single location. I can make them more intense. I can broaden them and I can make them more diffuse. We don't have three spotlights. We have two. But we don't just have one. And so if you understand attention as two spotlights, maybe one that's right there and one that's drifting, maybe two that can merge to a specific location. Or if you need to, when I, when we talk about spinning multiple plates, what we're talking about is toggling back and moving those spotlights and knowing that at one point, as you described,

• 3:27:21Speaker 01

  attention will truly be off some element and which element it is off of and what it's on is crucial in in high stakes, high consequences scenarios like you described. It's vital to survival. So we can learn how to do this, however, learning how to sit down and read a book without any distraction, or I actually like to put my phone right next to me and do a bunch of no goes. Every time that thing calls me, I just give it a little, oh, no, F you. No, no. And I, you know, you're practicing the no go pathway and reading a book. The other thing that's very useful for developing focus is something that people don't do often enough anymore, including me, which is writing in complete sentences. The ability to write and think in complete sentences is hard work.

• 3:28:07Speaker 01

  I have a colleague at Stanford, Carl Deisseroth. He no doubt will win a Nobel Prize. He's a psychiatrist and a bioengineer and incredibly successful in science also. He has five kids, practicing clinical psychiatrist. And I asked him, you know, what is your tool? What in the world are you doing? And he says, well, at least once every 24 hours, I sit down in a chair and I force myself to stay completely motionless and think only in complete sentences for about a half an hour. I tried doing this for about five minutes. It is really tough. I invite anyone to try and only write in complete sentences for five minutes when they journal as opposed to and you know, or texting, we tend to use, you know, descriptive clauses and we tend

• 3:28:50Speaker 01

  to do fragments now and we're starting. Now, the brain thinks in kind of fragments and symbols and that's very efficient. We wouldn't want to only think in complete sentences. But by writing in complete sentences, by forcing that pain of writing or that pain of thinking in a structured way, you are building up, you are reinforcing the neural circuits that support the so-called spinning of multiple plates, the ability to move the spotlight to a single location. You're learning how to harness the spotlight at one location. And so I think a lot of people don't realize they can train these circuits related to attention. You might say, well, how could writing complete sentences help me multitask? That doesn't make any sense. Ah, you're still taking control of these attentional systems.

• 3:29:34Speaker 01

  It's like learning how to operate any vehicle. Of course, it's not going to allow you to operate that vehicle in every context and in every way that vehicle could be operated, but you're learning the basic mechanics of attention when you force yourself to write in complete sentences, to think or speak in complete sentences. This is why I do the long podcast. I do these two and a half hour podcasts by myself and it's hard. And I think, oh, this is hard, but I can't just say a half a sentence and then just drop it because I know the rest of what I wanted to say. It's work, but it feels good. And this is the other element, which is that over time, the dopamine system can be woven into the systems that control effort. I guess the notion of growth mindset is, you know, learning to couple, Carol Dweck's

• 3:30:17Speaker 01

  beautiful work, is learning to couple the notion that effort is good for us, but neurochemically we can start to experience friction and think, ah, this is growing me. You know, in any other context, it would be corny, but in this context, and because of a Leah Crumb study of Navy SEALs, I can appropriately say, learn to think about effort like a SEAL would, which is, this is growing me. In that thought, you are releasing dopamine in response to effort. In other words, the more friction, you always say, good, more friction, good. I actually think about that a lot. I've had some trying circumstances recently, uninteresting for sake of this podcast, and I thought, God, this is either gonna make or break us. And I thought, what if I just decided that the more stress now, the better it's gonna be?

• 3:31:02Speaker 01

  And it's instantaneous, but then you have to keep doing that. And then when you wake up sleep deprived, you have to do it again. And when someone triggers, you have to do it again. So I love the OODA loop. And I love that you raised, for the first time I heard you, someone raised the OODA loop, not as something that's done once, but it's done over and over and over. So it's OODA loops.

• 3:31:19Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:31:20Speaker 01

  Plural.

• 3:31:21Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:31:21Speaker 01

  And I think we always hear about it as a unitary thing, but it's OODA loops, like you're in observation over here, and you're in action on this one.

• 3:31:27Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:31:27Speaker 01

  And so it's multiple OODA loops.

• 3:31:29Jocko Willink?

  Yep. Yeah. And by the way, you're running like a tactical, low level, like real time, short term OODA loop for what I'm gonna get out of this right now, but at the same time, you're running a bigger OODA loop, or you should be, a strategic OODA loop, that's looking at like, well, how is this gonna affect me, you know, six months from now? And then you've got an even bigger one that's going five years.

• 3:31:47Speaker 01

  That's the access.

• 3:31:48Jocko Willink?

  And you've got all these different OODA loops going on at the same time that you have to be running.

• 3:31:52Speaker 01

  Yeah. Forgive me, I didn't mean to interrupt. That's the fore, I was just too excited. I got too excited, I couldn't, didn't suppress my forebrain. The, uh, interrupting is a forebrain limbic friction glitch. Uh, forgive me. That's your forebrain accessing the library of past, present, and future.

• 3:32:09Jocko Willink?

  You know, this, uh, when you talked about, here's another interesting crossover. So a lot of times when I talk about people taking a step back, taking a breath, um, looking around, it's, the word I use for them, for, for doing that is detach. You have to detach from the chaos and the mayhem. You have to detach from your own emotions. Well, interestingly, another thing I will tell people, when they've got a more of a, let's say, a slow burning problem that they wanna figure out a solution for, one of the things I recommend they do is they write down what the problem is, write down what some various solutions are. And what that does is it-

• 3:32:49Jocko Willink?

  It literally detaches you from the problem because now you're having to think through really what this problem is and how you're going to articulate it on a piece of paper for yourself and then you're going to look at it from a detached perspective. You're going to read the words that you wrote and it really does, it really does allow you to see a new perspective and hopefully find a solution. And another thing I've been saying a lot lately is the solutions to your problem are not in the problem. When you have a problem, the solutions are not in there. If the solutions were in there, you just, it wouldn't be a problem, you'd just solve it. You have to get outside the problem. You have to figure out how to take a step back, how to see it from a different perspective. Cause if the solution to the problem was in the problem, you would just execute on that thing. It

• 3:33:33Jocko Willink?

  wouldn't even be an issue. So we have to, to take a step back and one of the best ways to do that, if you have the, the time and the opportunity to do it in, usually in what we call in the military, an administrative situation, meaning there's no bullets flying. Sit down, write down what is going on, what the problem is, maybe what some ideas are about viable solutions. But I think it's even better just to, to really detail what you see the problem is. Cause if you start trying to write down solutions, you're already, you're already trying to impose solutions on it. Write down what the problem is. Look at it. Take, walk away from it. Come back and read it again. And you're going to start to see that you're going to have a better chance of finding a solution than if you're living inside the problem.

• 3:34:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, I love that. I need to do it more often. I used to journal all the time. One of the problems with the phone is that it includes the ability to write down a quick note. I'll use the notes function or I'll put something into my voice memos. But anytime I go back, it's very fragmented. I think that writing and writing in complete sentences or diagramming is enormously powerful. I also, there was something you said that I, I need to think about. In terms of this ability to zoom out, we don't really know what that is. You know, the, the feeling of being in, we wake up every day and we know, we recognize ourselves in the mirror. It's amazing if you think about it. And we never wonder if we're somebody else, if provided we're not psychotic.

• 3:34:55Jocko Willink?

  Wait a second, let me catch up with you mentally here because I'm trying to figure out why it's amazing that I realize and recognize myself in the mirror. Why is that amazing?

• 3:35:01Speaker 01

  Well, we don't really know where the notion of the self sits in the nervous system. And yet, we go through life always experiencing things from a frame of reference of ourselves. A few people experience out of body stuff. There's a big effort now, of course, to use ketamine type therapies and dissociative anesthetics to help people move out of trauma. This is a work that's being done in clinics. And I've never tried these things or been part of these trials, but every time I hear a patient's report about it, they say, "I experienced myself as getting out of the car, seeing myself in the car of myself." Like, you know, normally, we wake up and we're in our body and we go. I think that's amazing. But you know, I'm a neuroscientist.

• 3:35:42Jocko Willink?

  No, I wanted to understand where your perspective is. Yeah, I get it now.

• 3:35:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's incredible because it's, and we don't know where that sits. There's no brain region or brain circuit that's, there's no clinical syndrome that people dissociate from self in that way. Maybe multiple personalities, but that's more rare than most people believe. But dissociative states are rare. And so, we, we go through life mostly from this perspective of me, me, me, me, me. And one thing that's been very helpful to me at least has been a colleague, again, Carl Deissera, said, you know, "Most of the time, we have no idea how other people feel. In fact, most of the time, we don't even know how we feel. We don't even know how to, we don't even have a language that can explain feelings. I don't know if how you feel right now. It relates at all to my understanding of how you feel."

• 3:36:29Speaker 01

  We can start really drifting into the weird and abstract. And as you've noticed up until now, I'm a pretty nuts and bolts guy. I like physiology. I love physiology of the nervous system and hormone systems. That's mainly what I've worked on. But I like actionable tools. I like, you know, in the military, right, it's, I have to assume that before a gunfight, you can't just say, "All right, guys, be brave and go in with a full heart." Right? You need, like, this is what happens when X happens. You need plans. You need protocols. And in science and in neuroscience, there are now protocols. We've been talking about those. But then there are the more abstract notions of the self and others and how to do that. And I think that's really where the future of neuroscience lies, is in trying to parse some of those deeper understandings. I don't have any knowledge to shed on that. All I can say is that

• 3:37:15Speaker 01

  We all are very self oriented. We all tend to approach life through the lens of self. And so I'm struck again and again, when I read your book and when talking today, your ability to this notion of taking others' perspectives. I think that's probably hard work for most people. And that occurs to me as something that's probably just as important to practice as writing in complete sentences.

• 3:37:37Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I have a couple triggers that I use when, you know, when you approach me with your plan and your plan doesn't make sense to me, that that immediately tells me, okay, he sees something I don't see. I need to try and get in his head. I need to try and figure out what his perspective is. When you're mad, you come into my office and I can see that you're mad. I immediately, I'm not thinking what's wrong with him. I'm thinking, what does he see that I don't see? And, and yeah, that's a critical part of not only just leadership, but just interacting with other human beings, you know, if you, if you, when I'm married, I've been married for a long time. When my wife, I can see a look on her face, she's not happy.

• 3:38:20Jocko Willink?

  I'm, I think what is happening, what is she seeing? What's her perspective on this that's making her not happy right now? Cause it's not going to benefit me to have her continue down this path. And it's usually something that I can make an adjustment on pretty quickly. And allow her to see maybe some of what I'm seeing, or allow her to see a little bit of a different perspective. So yeah, extremely important. Don't you ever do some things like even as a, as a scientist, where you're running an experiment and you get done and it kind of like felt like it was a, like it was just kind of happening, like you weren't like, you know, they say, I definitely have felt that way. I feel like, you know, if I'm doing jujitsu, have a good roll, man, I'm not in there. I'm kind of watching.

• 3:39:04Jocko Willink?

  Uh, you, you, you want to do that. You want to be able to detach. Do you have that in the, in your business?

• 3:39:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, that, you know, people talk about flow states. Uh, I'm friendly with Steven Kotler, and so I like to joke about flow, that the most thing that, the most that we can say about flow at this point in history is that backwards, it spells wolf. Meaning I don't think we really know how that's generated in the brain. Um, because some people describe it as a sense of losing time and being really in the experience. Other people describe it as being, you know, kind of third personing the experience. And so, um, this is more of a call to action for more definition about what flow is. It probably, probably five different kinds of flow.

• 3:39:43Speaker 01

  I've certainly had the experience of automaticity where I'm like, who's actually doing this stuff? You know, you get into these action patterns that are so trained, you're just watching yourself. You know, for me, it would be really nerdy stuff like, I can dissect a retina like nobody else. Let me put it that way. If you need me to take out an eyeball and put a retina on anything, get under a microscope, like I'm your guy. I've done it so many, hundreds of thousands of times and so, from so many different eyeballs, everything from human eyeballs right down to, you know, a marmoset eyeball. So, I'm the guy for that. But typically, I think, I'm not used to third personing quite as much. Certainly situations, I try and look at situations. I tend to do it by assembling a small team. So if there are data that don't make sense, or my podcasting, I love

• 3:40:28Speaker 01

  working in a small, this small group of guys and we, we, you know, whiteboard, what do we want to do? How do we want to structure things? So I tend to outsource my forebrain. One of the things that you see in, and I'm not describing myself here, but in creatives, they need handlers. People that are very creative, learn to put those spotlights into their creative endeavors, so much so that making toast is work. And so they tend to, as they achieve more success, dedicating more and more to, of the everyday things to other people, in an effort to try and get in that narrow trench. And so they're really taking, instead of trying to spin multiple plates related to multiple things, they're like, let's get all the plates spinning in unison, and just focus on this. And that

• 3:41:11Speaker 01

  can be very beneficial, but it does tend to take away that ability to outsource and be a multitasker. And so I think, success is a dangerous thing in that way, because the further up you go in science, the fewer experiments you're doing, and the more you're just focused on narrow things. And there, sometimes people will bring me data and I'll say, oh, that means this. And I'm like, no, that means that. And I'm like, well, I've been doing this a lot longer than you have. And blah, blah, blah, I'm the professor at Stamper. Then I think to myself, wait a second, they're a lot closer to the data than I am. And so we sit back and look at it as a group. So I tend to do it through groups. But I'll be on the lookout for this. Anytime you've described third personing, or this notion of good, growth from stress, great. Now I know why you say that. I think we can put

• 3:41:53Speaker 01

  a neuroscience definition on that. Because more stress equals more growth. Something that most people don't believe, and Ali Crumb's work, research on the SEAL teams, indicates, if not proves, that They believe this, more stress equals more growth. I think that's something that I'm certainly trying to adopt more and more in my life, especially as I get older. We tend to get a little complacent and set in our ways, right?

• 3:42:17Jocko Willink?

  No.

• 3:42:17Speaker 01

  Well, not you, but I, we, no, not you either. People in general, some of, some of us tend to default towards the things that feel good and move away from friction. But if friction is the lever for growth, and more friction equals more growth, and absolutely it does, well, then your statement, "good," makes complete sense.

• 3:42:39Jocko Willink?

  So, what do we, what are we doing food-wise? How, how deep are you into diet, food? What are we doing? You know, we get, let's say, let's, let's go back to, you know, we woke up in the morning, we got some, we, we got some light, we did some workout, we haven't taken any caffeine yet, we, maybe we hopped in the cold bath, now it start, you know, now the day's moving along. At what point are we eating?

• 3:43:08Speaker 01

  11:00 AM.

• 3:43:10Jocko Willink?

  Very similar to me. What are we eating at 11:00 AM?

• 3:43:13Speaker 01

  I'm laughing as I, inside as I say this because recently, you know, if you want to engage those neural circuits for battle online, just talk about nutrition or training.

• 3:43:25Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:43:26Speaker 01

  You know, so people are like, this guy's a neuroscientist. I'm gonna talk about what works for me. And I'm 46 and I'm happy that I can run far, not too fast, but I can run far and I can lift objects that certainly are not the heaviest objects in any environment, but I'm comfortable with my strength and endurance, and I feel good. That's what matters to me. And that I can focus and I can work even after I train. So, when I wake up, I'm going to hydrate. 90 minutes to two hours later, I'm going to drink caffeine. Which is typically yerba mate, pour over yerba mate, not the smoky ones. Turns out the smoky ones are loaded with carcinogens. So as bad as smoking. That sounds bad. It's really bad, but I like that stuff a lot. And I'm not just saying this to make you guys

• 3:44:11Speaker 01

  happy. I'm loving these energy drinks. I've been drinking them for a few weeks now. So loving it. Also because I don't like sucralose. Oh yeah, you did the ingredient check. I did the ingredient check and it's not be, I don't dislike sucralose because I think it's gonna kill my microbiome. I'm not trying to be catastrophic about it. I just don't like the way it tastes. But I think monk fruit stevia to me are fine. I'll occasionally have some aspartame. I'm not a big consumer of aspartame. But yeah, the fact that it's sweetened with monk fruit, I like. No, they're not paying me to say this. I really like this stuff. Although I'd be happy to work with you guys. I think, I want to just be clear. The Alpha GPC is something that I take in supplement form unless I'm having, drinking something that has Alpha GPC in it. There are good data on it. Alpha GPC is basically a choline donor

• 3:44:56Speaker 01

  increases acetylcholine, which is a molecule released from the nucleus basalis of Minert. Minert was the anatomist that helps enhance the intensity of those spotlights to put sort of a general description on it. And the ability to engage those spotlights. So. That's why we put it in there. So Alpha GPC is something that, you know, and there's some evidence that it can offset some age-related cognitive decline and those kinds of things. So there are a number of things in there that I like. So I'll drink some caffeine. I train in the early part of the day. Not, I can just quickly say that if we could talk about training separately, but I, I hit the weights every other day. I do, I run on the days I don't train with weights. And I do all workouts for about an hour. Very basic, but I've been doing that for 30 years.

• 3:45:42Speaker 01

  Check. Okay, I train, you know, I can get into the details, but you know, anyway. The, the food thing is basically after I train, I can last about an hour or so before I'm really hungry. And then I'll typically have some fruit and some starch if I've trained hard. If it's a glycogen depleting workout, you know, hit, hit the weights, then I'll have a big bowl of oatmeal and some fruit and I make sure I actually like throwing a little bit of butter and some fish oil in there and.

• 3:46:08Speaker 01

  You know, some fats and a protein drink at 11 and then around 130 or two, I want a real meal. And on the days when I don't train with the weights, I typically don't have that oatmeal protein drink meal. Instead, I'll have a real meal right at 11 or so. And typically it's a piece of meat, piece of grass fed meat, usually steak. I do not like chicken. I don't know why. It just doesn't appeal to me. I'll eat it if I have to. I might have a piece of salmon, but I'm not crazy about salmon. I'll have a piece of grass fed beef, like a ribeye or a hamburger patty or two and a salad. And maybe I'll have, you know, a slice of bread or something, a good bread, usually not.

• 3:46:51Speaker 01

  And then through the afternoon, I'm, I'm good. I typically will work anytime I'm not training or eating. Um, I try and just eat and not do work at the same time, but oftentimes I'm eating while I'm training. Uh, while I'm, I'm eating while I'm working. So I'll have lunch and take care of some email. And then in the afternoon, I will do after lunch, I'll typically lie down and do an NSDR, get a little nap, wake up. Where you sleep, sleep? Where I'll go under into the state of deep relaxation for 10 to 30 minutes. Do that. And then I can really do another workout in the afternoon. So I do some work in the morning, obviously. I work out in the morning. I eat at 11, the post workout and then a lunch or just the lunch. If I didn't work out with the weights and then I will do a little bit of deep relaxation, 10 to 30 minutes.

• 3:47:37Speaker 01

  Get up from that, hydrate. I'll typically take a quick walk outside. So none of that takes more than about 15 minutes and then I try and drop into another workout. And throughout the afternoon. Workout. Yeah. I like that. Cause I think of these as 90 minute bouts of work. The, the brain functions in what are called ultradian cycles. We have circadian, which means 24, ultradian, which is 90 minute cycles. All your sleep is broken up into 90 minute cycles. All your waking states are broken up into 90 minute cycles. With some training, you can teach yourself to focus really hard on something for about 90 minutes. But sometimes it's email, sometimes it's writing, sometimes it's data analysis, sometimes it's podcast prep, et cetera. But after about 90 minutes of intense work, I try and take a minute, view a horizon, relax, walk around. I try not to look at my phone.

• 3:48:22Speaker 01

  And then I'll go back into another bout of work. So I'm getting three or four intense bouts of work throughout the day. And then I'm not eating in the afternoon, throughout that afternoon. I had one or two meals already. And then I typically will eat dinner, depends, um, seven or eight PM. And I tend to put more carbohydrates in the evening. I know some people gasp at that, but come through, I should, I'm not saying, I'm not saying this to you guys. But you know, if you do a workout of the sort that I do in the morning, I mean, it sets typically to failure. I'm training not real quick, but you know, if you're depleting that glycogen, I'm fine to have a plate of pasta. And I'd have a little bit less protein in the evening because I find it very hard to get good sleep in a low carb state.

• 3:49:07Jocko Willink?

  See, I you, I will, if I want to sleep, or let's say, maybe something happened where I didn't have a hard workout during the day. And I know I'm going to have a hard time falling asleep. I might get a little bit of that rice going in up in the system. I have some spaghetti going up in there because I'm going that carb, damn, you know, coma.

• 3:49:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, you know, I'll do that, but we're not talking enormous volumes.

• 3:49:31Jocko Willink?

  Oh, I am.

• 3:49:34Speaker 01

  So some rice or some pasta, some risotto or something. I'm fortunate that my girlfriend's a really good cook, so she'll say, what do you want? And then I'll tell her and, and she'll cook it. She was a professional chef for a long time. So she's, and she's fast. So basically she says, what do you want to eat today and that kind of thing? And so that's what I get. And, um, I'm very lucky in that way. The, the one thing that I make sure to do.

• 3:49:53Jocko Willink?

  You know what, we can edit that out. You don't want to give up that kind of leverage in this scenario.

• 3:49:59Speaker 01

  We can edit it out.

• 3:50:03Speaker 01

  I'm really big on that, on that evening meal being mostly carbohydrates, also vegetables. I happen to really like vegetables and less protein. So I might have a small piece of fish or, or some, you know, broth, a soup or something like that. And keep in mind that then I'm not usually eating anything until 11 o'clock the next day. And I'm likely going to train again in the morning or run again in the morning. And so I want my glycogen topped off. I'm not looking to walk around at, you know, 6% body fat or anything like that. It might, I keep a relatively low body fat percentage and have for a long time. I feel good where I'm at. Um, you know, ebbs and flows depending on the season, but I have zero appetite for

• 3:50:44Speaker 01

  sugar. And that's a recent thing. A few years ago, I just started, I stopped having the half glass of wine just because everyone else was doing it. I stopped having dessert just because, and I noticed that I didn't like it and it just didn't make me feel good. And I'd much rather consume calories from clean sources like rice and meat and fish and vegetables. This kind of thing. I do eat some fruit. I'm not huge on dairy, but I'll have a little bit of really good cheese, really good Parmesan cheese or really good fermented cheese. One thing that's very clear from the scientific literature, uh, this is the work of Justin Sonnenberg and Chris Gardner at Stanford, that fermented foods, low sugar fermented foods, sauerkraut, kimchi, uh, low sugar kombuchas, Greek yogurt, unsweetened

• 3:51:29Speaker 01

  Greek yogurt, enhance the gut microbiome, these trillions of gut bacteria that actually make the sort of neurotransmitters that cross into the blood brain barrier and create the substrate for things like dopamine and epinephrine and et cetera, and can reduce inflammation markers. They call this the inflammatome. It's like looking at your genome. They looked at inflammatory markers in people that consumed four servings, which is not a lot, four two ounce servings of low sugar fermented foods per day, compared to increasing their fiber. Now, I'm not disparaging of fiber, but what they found was that people who ate a lot of fiber either increased inflammatory markers, maintained or decreased. It was all over the place. Mainly the effect of eating a lot of fiber is you increase the number

• 3:52:13Speaker 01

  of enzymes that you make that digest fiber. The people that ate a lot of fermented food, low sugar fermented foods, across the board, reduce these inflammatory markers. I feel better when I'm eating some kimchi, sauerkraut, etc. And we've started making our own, meaning she makes it, I don't make it. And to do that, we went to Tim Ferriss's for our body book, there's a recipe, or for our chef, excuse me. He describes in there a way that you can cut up cabbage and ferment it with some salt water. You have to do this properly because you can get some harmful bacteria, but if you do, you cover it with a cloth, you put it in the dark, you take it out, you skim off the bad stuff. It's kind of fun. And the reason for doing this is that a lot of live culture fermented foods can get pretty expensive if you have an appetite like mine. I love to eat, and I'll just eat it by the bowl full. And pretty

• 3:52:57Speaker 01

  soon, you're dropping $10 here. And you know, if you're downing kombucha left and right, you know, you're drinking some of the most expensive fluid. It's more expensive than petroleum. So, so I, we have big vats of kimchi and this kind of thing. And I like hot sauces. So she's figured out how to make fermented hot sauces. You can do all this stuff easily. And so I'm always eating fermented sauces and foods throughout the day. Kimchi's okay, although I think if you don't do it right, it can be pretty foul to be around. The smell's pretty intense. And yes, occasionally I'll have a slice of cobbler. But that's like once or twice a year. I just don't have an appetite for it. I really look forward to the post-training meal. A big bowl of oatmeal. Or yes, occasionally, if I'm training at a gym someplace, I'll be like, how do I get some glycogen back in my system? It's

• 3:53:42Speaker 01

  two bananas and a few bagels. Yeah, I've done it before. It might, there's no We cast you out. Exactly. Well, on the internet, people are like, oh, my goodness. You know, it's I don't know why this topic of nutrition has people so up in arms. And I, and the extremes, I've not tried the pure carnivore thing. I understand you can repack glycogen with gluconeogenesis protein converted to other fuels. I've not tried the plant-based thing because I would just be thinking about cows all day. And, and I like the animal, but I would just be craving meat. My dad's Argentine after all. And I don't tend to do cheat days anymore, that kind of thing. I shed that in my, you know, early 40s. But

• 3:54:25Speaker 01

  yeah, that's, it's pretty basic. And there's caffeine in the early part of the day. Hydration is really key. I mean, I think for the brain and for the body, hydration's key. And then we're not talking so much about supplements. But if there were one supplement that's really been shown to be useful for physical performance, but also Where most of the data point to is for brain fuel is creatine. You know, the, the forebrain system depends on a phosphocreatine type fuel in addition to glucose. And so I do five grams of creatine monohydrate a day. I will do the alpha GPC in an energy drink or before training. A lot of people forget that energy is not just caloric, there's neural energy, dopamine, norepinephrine.

• 3:55:07Speaker 01

  And we talked about the, the meat, if you, meat is rich with tyrosine. Tyrosine is an amino acid, red meat especially, that's the precursor to dopamine. Carbohydrates and white meat turkey are rich in the amino acid tryptophan, which is the precursor to serotonin. And so as I say this, it probably all makes sense that you can generate states of alertness and states of sleepiness depending on what you eat. I will say however, if you eat an enormous volume of anything, you will direct more blood to your gut relative to your brain. So if you have five ribeye steaks or two ribeye steaks, depending on how big they are. Yes, you will have a lot of tyrosine in your system. You also have a lot of blood in your gut and you'll be tired and you want to go to sleep. So you can't beat the system completely.

• 3:55:51Speaker 01

  But yeah, that's pretty much how I eat and I maintain some flexibility. I mean, we're in San Diego right now. I miss tacos. Taco Tuesday in San Diego is a special experience. Occasionally I'll have a white tequila margarita, which I love. Every once in a while, I'm not a super extreme guy on this stuff. And I would loathe to be pure carnivore or pure vegan. Sorry, Paul Saladino, he's a, you know, he's a friend and I have some vegan friends like Rich Roll. I just, I don't want to live that way. And I'm probably going to get assaulted for saying this, but um, you know, one group will come after me with celery sticks and the other group will come after me with raw meat. But all I can say is, you know, you do you and I love those guys. Um, I'll keep going the way I'm going and uh, we'll see how it goes.

• 3:56:36Jocko Willink?

  Well, I like the fact that you said you have vegan friends.

• 3:56:41Jocko Willink?

  You know, you, you, you mentioned, you know, sugar, the habit of sugar and you don't drink or don't take much sugar anymore. And you, you know, one of the podcasts that you've done is about habits, making habits, breaking habits. Give us some high level habit forming and habit breaking neurological strategies we can utilize.

• 3:57:06Speaker 01

  Well, we've already talked about how dopamine puts you into an action state and the serotonin system tends to bias you toward a more sedative state or calm state. Maybe even a more creative state, which is associated with calm states. If you are trying to build habits and you look to the neuroscience of habit building, you would be wise to put certain habits at the early part of the day and certain habits at the later part of the day. I call phase one of the day from zero to nine hours after waking. That period of the day, assuming that you're getting that sunlight exposure and a little bit of movement, but even if you're just getting some sunlight exposure, is going to be associated with high epinephrine, high dopamine, slightly higher cortisol.

• 3:57:52Speaker 01

  Certain habits, we could call linear habits. It's, it, these are things that you know how to do and you just need to do them. Other habits, and so those sorts of habits would go well in that zero to nine hours period that I call phase one, zero to nine hours after waking, phase one. Then phase two, and these aren't absolute phases, but that go from about 10 hours till about 16 or 17 hours after waking. We tend to be a little bit sleepier. We tend to be a little bit calmer, at least, not necessarily sleepy. Tend to be a little bit calmer. It's clear that other habits that have to do with what we call nonlinear brain operations, things like creative writing, brainstorming with a group, brainstorming with yourself, analytic work that is, where there is no clear right

• 3:58:35Speaker 01

  answer. It's not plug and chug. It's more exploratory. Go best in the second phase, phase two.

• 3:58:44Speaker 01

  I was thinking about, you know, rolling jujitsu earlier. I can't even call it rolling jujitsu. I've only done it once, but clearly there's a lot of moment to moment creativity and kind of sorting things out. Whereas weightlifting, it's sets and reps. You're trying to complete a certain amount of sets and reps. You're trying to cover a certain amount of distance running. Linear versus nonlinear. And then, of course, there's the 17 to 24 hours, which is phase three. And during that time, you want to be engaging one set of habits, which is sleep. Okay, roughly, it could be 16 to 24 hours, etc. So try and put the habits you're trying to form into the times of day in which those will actually be easiest. This sort of violates the earlier rule of try and access limbic friction. If there's

• 3:59:26Speaker 01

  something that you're really trying to adopt, more exercise, and that exercise is running a certain distance in a certain amount of time, put that in the early part of the day. If you're trying to do creative work, do it in the second part of the day. If you are trying to develop a new skill that's exploratory, second part of the day. If you're trying to learn a skill that has defined steps already, it's linear, early part of the day. People will just find that it's simpler to do it in that fashion. The other thing is that if you look at the science of goal setting, there are clear data. There's a woman at New York University, Emily Balchettis, or Balchettis, I think is the correct pronunciation. And she's described that while we like to think about envisioning success as the best

• 4:00:11Speaker 01

  way to set goals and develop new habits, it turns out, at least the research shows, it's far more effective to imagine the catastrophic effects of failure. It's, you know, it's the darkness none of us want to embrace, but fear is the more powerful motivator. But provided you can still think clearly, you don't want to put yourself into a state of panic. So, goal setting of, if I don't do this every day, I'm looking at diabetes and early death, is going to be a much more powerful motivator than imagining you're going, oh, I'm going to be, you know, 10 pounds lighter and, you know, I can, you know, bench press 15% more by Christmas this time of year. It's great to have goals. It's also great to have motivators that are based on real world fear.

• 4:00:55Speaker 01

  That's what the data say.

• 4:00:57Jocko Willink?

  I was having a conversation with a buddy of mine that's at a big medical company and we were, I was saying, you know, when my, when my, I was kind of, I was kind of professing guilt because when my kids were younger, you know, I did say, oh, you know, can we get some ice cream? And I said, sure. You want some type two diabetes to go with that? But this dude, no kidding, would have like needles and had like stick the kids so that they could get used to getting, oh, you, you want to have some ice cream? Cool. Go get the needle. We're gonna, we're gonna stick your finger so that when you have type two diabetes, you have to do an insulin draw.

• 4:01:34Speaker 01

  Oh, my goodness.

• 4:01:35Jocko Willink?

  I was like, I, I was like, damn, this dude one upped me. I don't get one upped that often when it comes to being stupid, but he seemed to pull it off.

• 4:01:44Speaker 01

  That's intense. The, I, yeah, I can't comment on parenting. The, we should also recall the dopamine reward system. The best way to reward yourself for a job well done is random intermittent reward. We've always talked up until now, or we've been talking up until now that, you know, effort reward is the cycle. Reward that cycle. Effort reward. But if you want to keep, remember dopamine, non-infinite but replenishable, how about not spend it at all? How about use what the casinos use in order to keep yourself into a state of motivation? So if you are checking off the boxes, I did this behavior, this new habit, that new habit, that new habit, great, do that.

• 4:02:26Speaker 01

  But don't celebrate every win. Celebrate random intermittent wins, right? So celebrate.

• 4:02:33Jocko Willink?

  How do you do that if you're in control of it?

• 4:02:36Speaker 01

  Well, don't reward yourself with external rewards very often. So make the training its own reward. So if it's, I'm gonna train and then I'm gonna have the pancake breakfast, great, do it every once in a while. But don't do it every Sunday. Don't do it every workout. So it's not so much about the frequency as much as it is how the pattern, what we call the schedule of reward. So, you know, and you can see this in sports teams and some of the challenges over the years of, you know, everyone gets a trophy. I mean, nothing is more undermining to the dopamine system than that idea. I mean, I don't know what happened with that, but I, and I don't want to punish anybody because I also don't know who it was, but that group or person who made that decision that everyone gets a trophy.

• 4:03:21Speaker 01

  Clearly did not read the literature about how the neuroscience of reward and the psychology of reward works. You actually diminish the role of rewards in every way and you take away the ability to access the reward system in the future. You're creating not, you're not creating soft versions of people. You're actually creating people, they're just like the rat with no dopamine. It's a really sad state. We have a name for that in humans. It's called Parkinson's. You deplete the dopamine system, people get shaky, they can't move. That's in the motor system, but people with Parkinson's also experience extreme lack of motivation and depression because of lack of dopamine. That's the characteristic feature of Parkinson's is lack of dopamine neurons.

• 4:04:02Speaker 01

  So you want to, every once in a while, reward yourself for reaching a goal. One way to do this and that we've structured on the podcast, but I can just describe really easily, is set three or four habits that you want to create for yourself in a list of six. So find six habits and decide every day you're going to do four, but never compensate day to day. There's reasons for doing this. You would say, let's say one day it's train if you're not, you know, run if you're not already doing that, write if you're not already doing that. You can list these off. Gratitude practice, NSDR, and then let's just come up with one, I don't know, eat a vegetable. We're just making these up. So you're going to list those out on your calendar and then every day you're going to do at least four, but as many as five.

• 4:04:45Speaker 01

  But if one day you only get one, you don't carry over and do 10 the next day. If you understand the dopamine system, you'll understand why. Because what you're trying to do is you're trying to train up a circuitry for giving yourself random intermittent reward for performing these habits on a regular basis. So people will go do these heroic workouts or they'll do a ton of stuff and then they'll reward themselves and they've just undermined the whole process of being able to do that consistently. If that wasn't clear, it's a little complicated, but the way that reward schedules work is you're trying to teach the circuitry to work regularly, be rewarded only every once in a while and at random.

• 4:05:21Jocko Willink?

  So if you were technically gonna do this, I would have to make a bucket with a bunch of ping pong balls in it. And most of the ping pong balls didn't have anything on them, but then some of the ping pong balls had, you know, a chocolate chip cookie.

• 4:05:40Speaker 01

  Perfect.

• 4:05:41Jocko Willink?

  And then every time I get done with my workout, I'm like, hey, I did the workout, I did a good job. I'm gonna grab a ping pong ball from the bucket. Nothing. Next day, nothing. Next day, nothing. Next day, chocolate chip cookie. That's what I would have to technically do, but I had to do the workout to pull one of these things out of the bucket.

• 4:06:01Speaker 01

  Perfect. And how many rewards to put in that bucket versus how many blank ping pong balls? You know, you could say maybe one third of them should have a reward, but remember it's random.

• 4:06:12Jocko Willink?

  Right.

• 4:06:12Speaker 01

  And so that exactly describes the way we would do an experiment on an animal or human in our laboratory. And then with humans, we do it in a very particular way. We actually pay them real money. We have people do hard work for money.

• 4:06:24Jocko Willink?

  Varying amounts of money?

• 4:06:26Speaker 01

  Often. And you can, you can record from the brain, you can record from dopamine centers or other centers. What happens is people start trying to create the most rational strategy. You get these maniacs that will just try and get as many reps as possible. This is not a discussion about learning and plasticity. We may get into that, but it's very clear that errors or the anticipation of a reward and then no reward, while it leads to disappointment, it also increases attention and the ability to focus on the next trial. Think about this, you're, what do you guys call it, behind glass, you're shooting, right? And you're like, you're missing. Every time you miss, the next trial is the one you're paying the most attention to. When you hit, you'd think, oh, the next one, I'm good. No, the next one, why would you be good? Why would you, why would you, you just succeeded.

• 4:07:10Speaker 01

  Why would your nervous system pay attention to what happens next? When you succeed, your nervous system goes, oh, that happened that way. And

• 4:07:17Jocko Willink?

  It's a little relaxation.

• 4:07:18Speaker 01

  It's a little relaxation. So errors, we know, cue up the forebrain and it increases activity in the prefrontal cortex. You're, I've only done this, never, I don't get behind glass, but I've thrown darts in a bar. And you're up there, there are people watching and you're, we used to do this in graduate school. There's this little bar in Davis and we'd throw darts and, you know, and you miss, you're like, mm, you know, you're really, it's almost that little anger and the next one, you're completely dialed in. But then you're like bullseye, bullseye, you know, off the, off the, ah. And when you make it, the next one, you're not paying as careful attention to your motor patterns. So you might get lucky, but you're not learning. So errors are key to learning and the proper ratio of errors to successful trials for optimal learning is very clear from machine learning and from human learning is the eighty-five, fifteen rule.

• 4:08:02Speaker 01

  The, how difficult to make a task should be eighty-five percent of the time you're performing it correctly, fifteen percent of the time you're performing incorrectly. More or less, plus or minus two percent, if you want to optimize learning.

• 4:08:14Jocko Willink?

  Eighty-five percent, you get it, fifteen percent, you miss.

• 4:08:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's about the right level of difficulty for motor skill learning, cognitive learning, et cetera. Any more than that is you're putting too much of a demand on the attentional systems. Any less, you're putting too little demand on the attentional systems. That's what the machine learning shows in humans. That's what the, the machine learning algorithm is based on human learning. That's what the animal data show. And of course, there'll be some variation on this, but if people are saying, oh, I want to teach these kids Spanish, or I want to teach people how to shoot. Well, make it difficult enough so that they're about fifteen percent error rate.

• 4:08:52Speaker 01

  Or jujitsu, I guess, I suppose.

• 4:08:54Jocko Willink?

  Well, jujitsu, unfortunately, when you start jujitsu, you're getting a hundred percent error rate because you're getting tapped out all the time. That's why it takes a, a lot of effort to get over the hump in the beginning.

• 4:09:05Jocko Willink?

  Look, we've been going for, for a while. I do want to, you've touched on this a little bit, but before we, before we wrap, and I can already tell if you're, if you're okay with it, hopefully we can do some more podcasts in the future.

• 4:09:19Speaker 01

  I'd love that. I'd love to have you on my podcast. I'd love to.

• 4:09:23Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 4:09:23Speaker 01

  Sit down, chat with you guys anytime.

• 4:09:24Jocko Willink?

  Let's do it. Um, let's get people ready for bed, ready for sleep. You've already talked about we, what we're doing, we, what, what our temperature is doing, how we, how we getting ready for bed at the end of the day? After our three bouts of work.

• 4:09:40Speaker 01

  I've always called them bouts.

• 4:09:41Jocko Willink?

  That's legit. I'm, I'm in, you know, you gotta have that. It's a mindset thing, right? You're like, okay, I, I need to, I need to get ready to get in the game.

• 4:09:48Speaker 01

  Forward center of mass.

• 4:09:49Jocko Willink?

  Yes.

• 4:09:50Speaker 01

  If you sit down and try, if you sit down to any cognitive task and, or a physical task and pray for focus, you're gonna be praying a long time. It just doesn't work that way. The brain needs, you need to recruit the attentional systems.

• 4:10:05Jocko Willink?

  We're doing this.

• 4:10:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. We need to, you really need to recruit the attentional systems. And I, I get,

• 4:10:12Speaker 01

  concerned about people trying to leverage too many tools, even though I talk about a lot of tools. At some point, you've got the work, you're there, caffeinated, you're hydrated, as you would say, go.

• 4:10:24Jocko Willink?

  Shut up and go. Uh, when I write books, which I've written a couple, I, I write a thousand words a day. And it takes about an hour and I, I rarely will write more than that. I almost never miss. Once I'm in the zone and I got a book, I, I won't miss. But that's a, I like the attitude of going in of, hey, this is about, like, I'm about to go get it on. And I need to just bring the heat for an hour. And, and I like that. That's a good idea.

• 4:10:51Speaker 01

  Yeah. I learned it in graduate school, cutting, there's this thing called a microtome where you take a brain, it's frozen and you slice it off like a deli slicer, one little piece at a time. And you.

• 4:10:59Jocko Willink?

  Is this a Hannibal Lecter scenario?

• 4:11:02Speaker 01

  I got a lot of stories from the lab that since you guys are not afraid of blood and guts, you know, we can get into that. But you're putting these little thin slices of tissue into these little wells of liquid. And it's very delicate work. And some of these specimens were very valuable, either because they came from human beings that had interesting experiences, like the loss of one eye or something, or because,

• 4:11:20Speaker 01

  the tissue had been created through a number of experiments that lasted months, if not years. So it's really important stuff. And what was taught to me by one of the, perhaps the greatest neuroophthalmologists at UCSF, Jonathan Horton, he said, the moment that microtome blade hits that tissue. A nuclear bomb could go off in the building and you're not going to increase the speed of the pull because the slower you can pull it, the better the quality of the tissue, but you can't stop. And so I learned to just lay it down through these brains and some people will put ice on it and go have lunch, come back and it never quite cuts right when you come back to it. So

• 4:11:49Jocko Willink?

  How long would it take to do a slice?

• 4:11:51Speaker 01

  For a small mouse brain would take, you know, maybe an hour, you can get

• 4:11:56Jocko Willink?

  Why did we not make a machine that would do it?

• 4:11:58Speaker 01

  Uh, the machines can't adjust the temperature and speed. Actually, the way you adjust the temperature, kids don't do this. You lick your finger and you put it on there and get it, there's just a texture of like very cold butter that's just right. It's a feel thing. The machine will crack the tissue. It doesn't know when it's screwing up.

• 4:12:13Jocko Willink?

  Oh.

• 4:12:14Speaker 01

  So I've cut through macaque monkey brains that took me somewhere between seven and eight hours. Um, and

• 4:12:20Jocko Willink?

  It's a single pull?

• 4:12:21Speaker 01

  As a, well, you're doing, you're doing a pull and then repeating and then

• 4:12:24Jocko Willink?

  Okay, got it, got it.

• 4:12:25Speaker 01

  Um, I've done that and I've done a, you can't do a whole human brain, but I've done a block of a human frontal cortex of all things and human retina where I think the, the longest I've gone is something like 11 hours of cutting. And in that case, you know, just to be clear about how this works, you've got a little bit of food next to you. You've got your portable bathroom next to you. Sometimes you have to urinate during these things. You handle it and you typically do this alone in a room. Um, and you finish off that thing and you get those things into tissue wells and there's almost nothing as satisfying. There are things more satisfying.

• 4:13:01Jocko Willink?

  How thin is each slice?

• 4:13:02Speaker 01

  About anywhere from 20 to 40 microns. So a millimeter is divided into a thousand microns. So a credit card's 200, approximately 200 microns thick. So very, very thin. You can see through it. It's translucent and it's so much fun. And then you stain them and you put them under microscopes and my career was built on this work too. So you're also thinking about the, you're collecting the, the crops of your, of your farm, so to speak. It's, it's so pleasurable. It really is.

• 4:13:30Jocko Willink?

  You wouldn't get any third person personality, what were you calling it? What you wouldn't get any detachment when you're doing that? Kind of get in the zone?

• 4:13:36Speaker 01

  I'd occasion, we didn't, I didn't really listen to audiobooks back then. I would listen to a lot of rants. Uh, listen to a lot of, Glenn Gould is a classical pianist. If ever you need to do work and you want to listen to classical music and you're not really into classical music, Glenn Gould is just perfect for that background brain state.

• 4:13:54Speaker 01

  And just amazing piano player. So I would do that. And so I guess the point is that we can train ourselves to focus and it feels so good. It reminds me of my bulldog chewing on something.

• 4:14:08Speaker 01

  And you know, I'm gonna, I wasn't gonna reveal this. When I got him, I got him from a guy named Elvis. So I named it Costello. But there was a moment, because this was about to, I thought about naming him Jaco. Because you guys both have big necks, you know, so the, anyway, it's, I got, got him earlier. But there was always this question, do we keep Costello as his name? Because I didn't name him. Someone had said it and I was like, maybe we keep Costello. Anyway, there was a debate in our household at one point. Costello won out, sorry. But hey, someone out there has named their dog Jaco. And hopefully it's because they have a thick neck.

• 4:14:45Jocko Willink?

  Quite a few dogs out there named Jaco. There's a couple of kids out there named Jaco. There's some police dogs out there named Jaco.

• 4:14:50Speaker 01

  Other Jaco tattoos?

• 4:14:51Jocko Willink?

  Yes, there are some Jaco tattoos out there in the world. Yeah, if you, if you talk about like, people get good for a tattoo. People get this, freedom for a tattoo. Those are pretty cool. Yeah, so there's some of that stuff going on. Anyway, has anyone gotten any, you know, Huberman lab tats yet?

• 4:15:07Speaker 01

  Not that I'm aware of, but I will say this, if anyone gets a tattoo of Lex Friedman's face, I'll be happy to have a one hour zoom with you to discuss any topic of neuroscience you want. So if anyone wants to get a neck, and if you get a neck tattoo of Lex Friedman's face, then we'll do a two hour zoom.

• 4:15:21Jocko Willink?

  I was on Lex's, I was on Lex's podcast.

• 4:15:26Jocko Willink?

  I was on Lex's podcast and it was an interesting interaction, we'll say. And he's, he's an awesome guy. It was just like, I don't know, it was a little strange, but, and somebody actually nailed it. They said, this is like the Terminator from the second Terminator movie interviewing the Terminator from the first Terminator movie. Because he was asking me little questions and I was giving him like one word answers for whatever. It took a while to get like a flow going, you know, it's kind of funny.

• 4:15:57Speaker 01

  He's a good friend of mine. I, I, yeah.

• 4:16:00Jocko Willink?

  I know, I want to do it again. I wanted, I want to, I gotta do his podcast. Again, where we where we have a little bit of a cause now I kind of know him and we've had some other We've we actually the last time I talked to him on the phone. We were actually just laughing our asses off about a couple of things. That was one of the things I told him. Hey, I read this comment about When you when you interviewed me and he was just laughing because he was so accurate. It was kind of funny. Maybe you guys should roll jujitsu. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can just settle it out. Yeah, yeah. You know, just what I don't think there was any friction, but maybe you guys just if you roll jujitsu, then it's a No, there wasn't. There wasn't any friction. It was just, uh, I think. He, you know, he, he started off with some question like, are you afraid of death? I'm like, no.

• 4:16:42Jocko Willink?

  And it kind of went from there. It was like, okay, you know, if you, he's like, do you want to expand on that? I'm like, I'm not afraid of death. Whatever it was, but it was funny. Um, it sounded funny afterwards when I listened to it. I was like, man, why? I don't know what happened. I listened to that podcast. I really enjoyed it. Yeah, like I said, and and I I really like Lex and I really like his podcast. And, uh, yeah, and the other funny thing is we were kind of chilling. Like we met was in LA. We're we're talking, you know, we're just talking and and we sit down and that was another thing. It kind of Like we're just talking like whatever. And then all of a sudden he's like, and he's doesn't, he wasn't making eye contact with me.

• 4:17:25Jocko Willink?

  And he goes, are you afraid of death? Like just, we're talking about whatever and he goes, are you afraid of death? And I was like, wait, no. And then I guess that was the start of the podcast. Echo is getting a kick out of this. Straight to the deep end. So true, that's right. Straight to the deep end. Lex, my brother. You guys should do it again. You guys, who knows? Maybe he'll I'm sure I'll get down to down to Austin at some point and um, hook it up. Talk to talk to Lex again. And hopefully I can be, this is by the way, this is just like, cause I was just, I don't know. I don't know what what I messed up, but I'll do better. I'll do better next time. I won't be, uh, I won't be like a Terminator robot. I guess I'll try not to be. But but your response about the death question will be the same.

• 4:18:10Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, my response about the death question will be the same, you know, and are you afraid of death? No.

• 4:18:17Speaker 01

  Definitely a non sequitur there. Yeah.

• 4:18:23Jocko Willink?

  Uh, so back to sleep.

• 4:18:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:18:26Jocko Willink?

  To wind this.

• 4:18:27Speaker 01

  Getting ready.

• 4:18:27Jocko Willink?

  To wind this initial.

• 4:18:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:18:30Jocko Willink?

  Podcast up. What do we, uh, how are we getting ready for sleep?

• 4:18:33Speaker 01

  Okay. View some sunlight in the afternoon before the sun goes down. Why? It adjusts your retinal sensitivity in a way that allows you to get, to view a little bit more artificial light at night without disrupting your melatonin. Beautiful study published in Scientific Reports shows this. It adjusts that sensitivity so that bright light from screens isn't going to really mess you up quite as much. I call it your, your Netflix inoculation. However, dim the lights in the evening, especially overhead lights. These neurons in the eye that we were talking about before that set the circadian rhythm and generate states of alertness. They're more or less in the lower half of your eye and they view the upper visual field. Makes sense. They're there to extract sunlight.

• 4:19:16Speaker 01

  So if you're going to light your environment, which you should, obviously you need to move, move about, put lights, you know, use lamps or table lamps, or if you want to get really extreme stuff near the floor. If you're really into this, you could get red bulbs and because red shifted light is actually going to be less disruptive to your circadian rhythms. In fact, there's a nice study looking at for shift workers, red light isn't going to increase cortisol late in the day. And shift work is something, obviously, thank you, shift workers. We realize that much of what we talked about, you can't access because you're doing the important work at night that all of us depend on. I have a whole episode on shift work that people can get tools for that. There's a long discussion, but. So dim the lights, set them low in the room, red lights, if you're really extreme about it.

• 4:20:00Speaker 01

  Put on blue blockers if you do that sort of thing, but, or just dim the lights.

• 4:20:06Speaker 01

  Cool the environment. In general, it's not good to fall asleep within two hours of eating a big meal. But you'd be, if you can fall asleep, it's always good to get sleep. So, you know, that some people are really neurotic about this. Like, I won't eat within two hours of bedtime. Fine, but if you get home from work two hours late because of traffic, are you gonna not eat and then not sleep? I mean, just be a human. Eat dinner and then try and give yourself a little bit of time before you go to sleep. So, in all seriousness, I would hate to see people obsessed too much. Hydrate, but of course, don't drink a ton of fluid before going to sleep because there's a direct circuit from the bladder to the brainstem. This is why you wake up in the middle of the night because you have to go to the bathroom. So, don't overhydrate at night.

• 4:20:49Speaker 01

  And if you do a hot bath or a sauna or something like that, obviously hydrate, but remember that cool off after that will help drop your body temperature even further. Then, in terms of your sleep environment, there's a really nice paper that just came out in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showing that people that sleep in a room where there are ambient lights, where there's lights on, even if they're pretty dim, some of that light actually gets through the eyelids and disrupts metabolism and morning glucose management and insulin secretion. So, try and keep your sleeping environment as dark as possible. Don't obsess about one little light or something. But if you've ever been in the hotel with a bright blue light, it's really annoying. You know, the one bright light in the corner. And here's the other thing. Some people, like me, have really thin eyelids.

• 4:21:34Speaker 01

  Don't ask me why. Some people have thick eyelids. So, some people can see light through their eyelids more than others. Damn. Yeah, it's, you know, so, wear an eye mask if you want to, but keep it dark. So, there are a bunch of different things. And if you are, the one really important thing that most people are not aware of is that work from Chuck Zeissler's lab at Harvard Medical School has shown. Wait, Harvard? Who's, where's that? It's this little school in Boston. They have a couple campuses and they have good people. Some good people came out of there. It's an amazing place. It's a tough place. People are. The training there, there's a lot of, it's rigorous at many, many places, but Harvard's reputation of, they, they, they really like the old school academic grind. They do modern

• 4:22:17Speaker 01

  science, but they, they really like, they like to add friction.

• 4:22:20Jocko Willink?

  Do you go out there ever?

• 4:22:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I've got a lot of friends at Harvard Medical School and at the undergrad campus and I have good relationships to all of them. New York's got its neuroscience, we call it the New York neuroscience mafia. They all have tickets to the opera, they all are very cultured and they do neuroscience. Boston, they just live academics. I mean, the town of Boston's amazing. I mean, students everywhere, everywhere in Boston, someone is pursuing something. The punk rock bands in Boston work harder than anywhere else. It's just, it's, it's a, they, they like friction. They're, they're, they're, you know, built on friction.

• 4:22:51Jocko Willink?

  Boston, yeah.

• 4:22:52Speaker 01

  Yeah. Bay Area and Stanford, especially, it's about, because of the technology sector, it's about the future. We care about the lineage of the past, of course, and our Nobels and all that stuff, but it's really about what's next. The students want to start companies. They want to change the entire world. Other places too, but Stanford, there's a, there's this idea of the future is where it's at. The past, you know, an undergraduate once said to me, you know, I said, oh yeah, this guy downstairs from me discovered the structure of RNA and his dad discovered basically RNA. And I says Nobel Prize and like, does he have an app? You know, and it's like, what, you know, I mean, that work is transformative in, you know, many ways, but it's just, well, what, how is it impacting the real world? That's one reason I like, really like being at Stanford. It's about real world impact

• 4:23:35Speaker 01

  now. So, but they're, Harvard's great. So, basically, you want to, Chuck Zeissler's lab at Harvard Medical School showed that about an hour before your natural bedtime, you're going to be very alert for about an hour. There are evolutionary theories about why this would be, that you're going to tamp down all your, your village resources, you're going to make sure you're safe.

• 4:23:58Jocko Willink?

  Set security.

• 4:23:59Speaker 01

  Set security. Set security.

• 4:24:02Jocko Willink?

  Set security, right? You gotta go to bed, you gotta set security. I set security at my house, just like you're saying.

• 4:24:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:24:07Jocko Willink?

  Right? You get, get ready for bed at night. It's like, oh, go make sure that the external perimeter is secured. Make sure the locks are locked. Make sure the alarm systems aren't. Make sure the dog is rabid and ready to eat people, you know? Make sure your magazines are loaded and, you know, you're good to go. Booby traps are set.

• 4:24:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, we are vulnerable in sleep as a... The vampire shift of ops knows all too well, right? Hit them while they're sleeping. So you want to respect that and not worry about it. A lot of people freak out, "Why am I wide awake?" It will pass. And I wish more people knew about this because it's everyone experiences this. And then the other thing is, light inhibits melatonin and melatonin is the molecule of sleepiness. So viewing bright light will quash your melatonin. That's why you want to dim the lights in the evening. And if you wake up in the middle of the night and you need to go use the bathroom, that's perfectly normal, but don't flip on lights that are super bright. Use a nightlight. Don't use bright overhead lights.

• 4:25:10Speaker 01

  Don't go into a super bright environment. You will suppress your melatonin. Now, a lot of people go to bed around 11 or 12 and wake up around 2 or 3 and can't fall back asleep. And one more prominent theory in the sleep science community now is that those people should have gone to bed at 8:30 or 9:00 PM and that their melatonin is running out, basically. So play with your bedtime. I, for instance, have learned, we were talking about this before we started, that a going to bed for me at 10:00 PM, I'm up at 4 feeling great. If I go to bed at 11:00 PM or midnight, I can sleep till 7 or 8 and never feel quite right. And part of that's because I'm waking up 2 or 3 times in the middle of the night.

• 4:25:51Speaker 01

  So you have to figure out where your optimal to sleep time is and that will change across the lifespan. Young kids sometimes want to stay up later and sleep in later and need more sleep. And as we get older, supposedly we need less sleep, we become early risers. People obsess a little too much about this, you know, morning person, late person thing. You got to figure out when your best to bedtime is. If you wake up in the middle of the night and you want to go back to sleep and you cannot, I recommend listening to that non-sleep deep rest script. It'll at least keep you from scrolling through social media or thinking about problems. You're better off doing non-sleep deep rest than being wide awake when you want to be asleep. Okay. And you're better off being asleep when you want to be asleep, obviously.

• 4:26:33Speaker 01

  So one way you can get better at sleeping is to use an app like Reverie, R E V E R I. This is based on research at Stanford. There's a sleep function in there. They will allow you to try it for free. There is a nominal cost after that, and it's hypnosis for sleep. And it's not someone hypnotizing you. It teaches you to relax yourself into a state where then you drift off into sleep. And it's the clinical data and the scientific papers on this are very strong.

• 4:26:59Jocko Willink?

  So is it, if I put on the app right now, what's it gonna do? I'm ready to go to sleep. What's it doing? Does it tell me to think about this?

• 4:27:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:27:07Jocko Willink?

  Is it ASMR?

• 4:27:08Speaker 01

  ASMR, like the scratching of the microphone. I have this weird obsession with ASMR.

• 4:27:16Speaker 01

  So there's a state of mind we call hypnosis that involves being very alert, but focused on internal state. So normally it's hard to be very alert with your eyes closed. And some people can access this state better than others. And in this state, you are very suggestible. And some people can be more readily hypnotized than others. There's a colleague of mine at Stanford, David Spiegel, he and his father are MDs. His dad's dead now, but they developed this field of hypnosis for psychiatry and for reprogramming the mind and pain management, trauma, but also sleep, et cetera. There's a simple test that we can do and anyone can do. If you can look up.

• 4:27:56Jocko Willink?

  You did this with Rogan, didn't you?

• 4:27:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, if you can maintain upward gaze and close your eyes, you are highly hypnotizable. If you have a hard time maintaining upward gaze with your eyelids closed, you are less hypnotizable. It's a one to four scale. Now, keep in mind, if this sounds wacky, how do they evaluate concussion? Based on the size of the pupils relative to one another by shining light in one or the other eye. So the eyes, as two pieces of brain, are the neurologists, and in this case, the psychiatrist's primary tools to assess the brain without putting you into a brain scanner. So it sounds wacky because it's like look up and then close your eyes. We can do it with you. If you look up and then, keeping upward gaze, slowly close your eyes. Yep, looks like you can do it. Yep, see how you saw the whites of his eyes?

• 4:28:40Speaker 02

  And so what does that mean?

• 4:28:41Speaker 01

  It means he's highly hypnotized. Now, why?

• 4:28:43Speaker 02

  That makes sense to me completely.

• 4:28:45Speaker 01

  So you could try Reverie and that will help you fall back asleep, that sort of thing. And if you wake up in the middle of the night, you know, and you, the worst thing you could do would be to look at any bright light or screen light. That would be a terrible idea because you're going to quash your melatonin, you're going to start bringing in new sensory stimuli. I mean, just think about how unusual that is. Normally you wouldn't bring in new sensory information in the middle of the night. Now you're accessing information from Nova Scotia, Africa, you know, and Texas all at once. And you're watching the Lex Friedman podcast, you know? So, um, those are the things around, around sleep that are really useful. And then of course, there are some supplements that if you're doing all the other things correctly and you're still not sleeping well.

• 4:29:27Speaker 01

  The supplements that a lot of people benefit from are magnesium threonate, T H R E O N A T E, or magnesium bisglycinate. Those forms of magnesium help speed the transition into sleep and the depth of sleep. They are interchangeable with one another. Bisglycinate or threonate seem to be equally effective. Some people also benefit from taking something called apigenin, A P I G E N I N. It's a derivative of chamomile. 50 milligrams of apigenin will help you. A lot of people kind of turn off their thinking. It's non-addictive. It has high safety margins. Obviously, talk to your doctor, you know, if that's important to you. These things are readily available. I don't have a relationship to apigenin company. Swanson makes it. I have no relationship to Swanson.

• 4:30:09Speaker 01

  Mag threonate, the cost varies tremendously where you look. I've seen it very expensive and I've seen it less expensive. I can't tell the difference between the different sources, so my wish is that the expensive companies will bring the price down, but I've noticed a ratcheting up. And then some people will take, oh, and it's 144 milligrams of magnesium. For whatever reason, they always chart it out as 144. About 5% of people will get some gastric distress from mag threonate. But it is distinct from magnesium malate or magnesium citrate. Magnesium citrate is a terrific laxative. Magnesium malate seems to be better for muscle soreness and on and on. There are these magnesium jockeys out there. They get really nuanced about this, but mag threonate or bisglycinate will help.

• 4:30:51Speaker 01

  And then there's theanine, T H E A N I N E, which Many people take also before sleep a hundred to 200 milligrams or so. It will give you more vivid dreams than you would otherwise. So if you're a sleepwalker, you have night terrors, don't take it, but you can take that. Theanine is now showing up in energy drinks and in coffee because it's a slight, it pushes back on the systems that cause stress. It reduces the jitter. So you can drink a lot more coffee if you're also taking theanine, but everything I just described would be taken 30 to 60 minutes before bed. And then if you want to bring out the really heavy guns, which I haven't talked about before in a podcast, but there's some interesting data and I've been looking at and researching inositol.

• 4:31:34Speaker 01

  900 milligrams of inositol. Wow, that's a sedative. I mean, if there ever was any a sedative. It also is.

• 4:31:42Jocko Willink?

  What's the deal with inositol?

• 4:31:43Speaker 01

  Inositol is hitting these GABAergic transmitters.

• 4:31:45Jocko Willink?

  Is it a drug?

• 4:31:46Speaker 01

  No, it's a supplement that it's, you know, it's in the vitamin pathway that will reduce anxiety. 900 milligrams of myoinositol is the form that you want to seek out if you're going to try this. I did it for a while. I slept very, very well. I replaced the other stack with inositol. Again, no relationship to inositol company. The problem was I felt so mellow in the morning. I didn't like it. For me.

• 4:32:10Jocko Willink?

  Anger.

• 4:32:11Speaker 01

  And our podcast photographer, he doesn't do well with Mag 3 and 8. It disrupts his stomach. So he took inositol. He called me the next day. He's like, what is that stuff? I slept 10 hours. So, you know, different sensitivities, but inositol seems to work well for people that are on a low carbohydrate diet and have a hard time getting into sleep. So I think we can expect that the inositol market is going to start to pick up some momentum soon because it really does work quite well. And, you know, but better, to me, better than Ambien or prescription drugs, you know, always go behaviors first, then supplements if you need them, and then the prescription stuff. If that's your thing and you have a doctor that's going to help you with that. But my goal has always been to rely on as few prescriptions of anything as possible by doing the right behaviors,

• 4:32:54Speaker 01

  avoiding the wrong behaviors and diet and supplements.

• 4:32:57Jocko Willink?

  When you were a kid, you were going to that therapist and they maybe thought you were a little jacked up psychologically. Did they, did they put you on anything back then?

• 4:33:03Speaker 01

  Nope. And I'm so glad they did not.

• 4:33:06Jocko Willink?

  Do you think the tendency now is that they put people on stuff a lot quicker?

• 4:33:09Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 4:33:10Jocko Willink?

  That is right?

• 4:33:10Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And there are cases where this is vitally important, but I am so grateful that I went through all that before the massive SSRI phase. Before, um, I don't think I had ADHD. If anything, I have a bit more of an OCD, as you guys can probably tell. I get into a pretty narrow trench and I, you know, we'll just keep going until people say stop. But, um, and always have been that way. Um, but when I was a little kid, I had a little bit of a grunting tic. And my family physician was smart enough to know, eh, just wait, it'll pass. Those four brain circuits of suppression are starting to develop. Um, nowadays they'd put a kid on Tourette's medication. So I am very wary of, I mean, you're blitzing these neurochemical systems.

• 4:33:53Speaker 01

  And again, there are cases where people really need it. Suicidal depression, please get on an antidepressant and get talk therapy. Um, severe ADHD, please talk to a psychiatrist and a psychologist, get the diet right too. But I would just, my wish for humanity is that we, yeah, someone told me, I'm cutting myself off on purpose. A psychiatrist colleague at Stanford told me that more than 75% of the psychoactive medication that's consumed in the world is consumed in the United States. It's us and we have no one to blame for this except ourselves.

• 4:34:26Jocko Willink?

  And it's not like we have like the extremely rough environment that we're in, we're in America.

• 4:34:34Speaker 01

  What we created in here.

• 4:34:35Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. What was up with the, the gun school suicide? Cause I did, I did, uh, read a little bit about that when I was doing a little research on you. And I just happened to, happened to click into that. What was going on with that? Like, what was it? 2017? They had four suicides? They have a really high suicide rate? Well, what's going on with that?

• 4:34:57Speaker 01

  Unclear, but you know, when I went to gun, it was academically rigorous. Um, our football team was terrible, probably still is terrible, but there were some good sports there. So it wasn't a lack of physical activity. Um, music and orchestra stuff is pretty big there. Um, so we know that now the kids are under significant pressure for academic performance. There's a, there are train tracks not far from there and a good number of the suicides were by train. Um, it became a, you know, a bit of a spreading phenomenon.

• 4:35:31Jocko Willink?

  A little social contagion?

• 4:35:32Speaker 01

  A little social contagion. Um, there is the idea that.

• 4:35:38Speaker 01

  People were pushing their kids too hard in terms of academic performance. Who knows? We can only speculate. There was the idea that, you know, if you create an environment that's such high pressure and demand and, you know, I think they've now forbidden the kids from meeting before school to do study sessions. They were meeting at six, seven AM and studying. You know, and I don't think we can point our finger at any one thing or one collection of things, but yeah, what a terrible situation. And I think it's hopefully resolved itself now over time. Someone from Gunn, actually, someone related to Gunn, a parent, actually contacted me at

• 4:36:22Speaker 01

  one point because they saw on their Wikipedia that I had attended there and asked what my thoughts were on this. And I said, listen, I'm not a psychiatrist or psychologist, but I went to that school. I certainly had my challenges at that time. Give them tools, please, you know, tools matter. Talking, you know, the tell a friend or if you suspect, absolutely, you know, call, call people, but give people tools to understand when their mind is drifting off course. And I think most of the tools that we've talked about today, certainly the behavioral ones, they absolutely pertain to adults and to kids. You know, I think if our young people can learn how to self-regulate in both directions, ramp up and ramp down as needed, overcome limbic friction, recognize limbic friction,

• 4:37:07Speaker 01

  understand the dopamine reward system. I do hope, I have this fantasy that it will help them know when they're on track and when they're drifting off course.

• 4:37:16Jocko Willink?

  One thing that I think is very cool about your story is, look, I mean, I got four kids, you know, two of them in college now. That pressure of this academic success being, it's, it's, can be psycho. And I think it's cool. You're an example of someone that barely passed high school, took a little while to figure out what you wanted to do, was able to get on a path. So maybe to all the kids out there, if you're under some hyper academic pressure right now. Man, you you you can get there. You can get there. Um, you know, this guy right here barely made it out of high school and now he's a tenured professor at Stanford. That's that's

• 4:37:58Jocko Willink?

  that's pretty awesome that you were able to do that. And you know, some people, some of these kids, they don't get into whatever college they wanted to get into and they think it's the end of the world.

• 4:38:08Speaker 01

  Right.

• 4:38:09Jocko Willink?

  And and and and look, when you're young, of course, you break up with your girlfriend, it's the end of the world. You know, you you lose a football game, it's the end of the world. There's all these things. When your world is small, there's a lot of things that look like the end of the world. But I think you're a great example of the fact that, look, you got time to figure out this stuff. And I'm the same way. You know, I joined the Navy. I was a rebellious young kid, didn't did shitty in high school, wasn't a great athlete. Okay, join the Navy. Start going down the path and start to figure things out. And the same thing as you, work hard. So if you're a kid out there and you're feeling the pressures that the whole world's gonna fall apart because you missed some random hurdle about getting into college, or whatever you got on your SATs, which by the way, I don't even take SATs anymore in California.

• 4:38:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, I heard they don't have physical education anymore either.

• 4:38:57Jocko Willink?

  Uh, they do have physical education. Um, they still do have physical education. I would say it's probably not as rigorous as it should be. I'm sure you've seen those videos of like, what, that some school in the fifties or sixties that they put this regimented physical education in and these kids, you see, have you seen those videos I'm talking about, Echo Charles?

• 4:39:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, the one they're doing, they drop to the pushups.

• 4:39:18Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, they're doing pushups, but like, it's a troop. And these kids all look like freaking commandos. It's pretty awesome. And that's how it should be. But yeah, that's, I think you're a great example of, hey, you can, you don't have to have a perfect path to being very successful and doing what you truly want to do. And there's another thing that kids get messed up on. They think they should know what they want to do, what they want to do with their lives when they're 14 years old. And, "Oh, what do you want to be when you grow up?" "I don't know." And they feel bad because of that. It's actually perfectly fine. Take a little time to figure it out. Now, I will say this, and you already said this as well. Go to school. Try and get good grades. Don't do freaking drugs. Don't get in trouble.

• 4:40:02Jocko Willink?

  Cause then your options will be broader when you do get older. But none of these things are the end of the world. And actually, I'm talking about kids. I'm not just talking about kids. You can be 38 years old and figure out, "Oh, you know what? I'm gonna, I'm gonna get my shit together right now and I'm gonna start moving in the right direction." I mean, you talked about a bunch of skateboarders and I knew a bunch of hardcore kids that didn't square themselves away until they were 37 years old. And so, we all have options out there. And you're, you're not gonna, you're not gonna nail it, man. No one nails a perfect game. It doesn't happen.

• 4:40:36Speaker 01

  No, it doesn't. And, you know, if you can start early, great, but develop great work habits, but learn how to toggle between work and rest. And I always say, find non-destructive ways to renew yourself. You know, so many of the, the forms of renewal, not just when kids are in college or in high school, but also I look at the corporate world, and this is an issue that I actually had with academia for a long time. It was like, "How are we gonna rest after a hard work of, uh, hard week of work in graduate school? They're gonna do beer hour." And you got people just like tying one on. Okay, sure, like, I have nothing against people having a couple cocktails if that's their thing, or beer, or whatever. But people are just finding absolutely destructive ways to learn to rest. They don't learn anything in that case. So, have non-destructive ways to recover yourself.

• 4:41:21Speaker 01

  That could be a long jog, or a hike on the weekends, or go swimming, or go watch a movie, or do something creative, draw, I mean, spend time with people, whatever it is. Um, you know, and I realize I'm coming across as kind of, you know, it's, it's a little, it sounds a little corny, but at the same time, you will go further and faster than everybody.

• 4:41:40Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And, and what's important about what you just said, and this is some tying back to something you talked about earlier with these dopamine systems that we have.

• 4:41:49Jocko Willink?

  It's a cycle and you can get yourself moving on the right cycle, but that first step is hard, right? That first, you're gonna get a reward when you go for a run. You're gonna get a reward when you get done with squats. You're gonna get rewarded when you get done with jujitsu. You're gonna get a reward, but that getting there, you have to impose that first part yourself. You have to make it happen. And that's, there's gonna be, you know, your limbic system is gonna be giving you friction about how comfortable you are right now. And maybe just another donut will be just as good. And that's kind of a reward right now. Don't listen to it. Take action, go out and step into it. And you're gonna start yourself onto a cycle that is way more positive and it's gonna have much better results in the long run than listening to your limbic system, which is telling you to

• 4:42:32Jocko Willink?

  eat another donut, have another beer, get some immediate dopamine from something that takes no effort whatsoever.

• 4:42:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, or sit back and just scroll to your death.

• 4:42:41Jocko Willink?

  Ooh. Jack. Uh, listen, probably a good place to wrap it up. We're approaching, um, five hours. Anybody that's listened to this that wants to go deep, look, there's probably some people that are thinking, oh, he kinda went deep on some subjects. No, you, this was like Andrew Huberman, uh, the, the shallow zone, right?

• 4:43:03Speaker 01

  Cliff note.

• 4:43:03Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, this is the Cliff Notes version, uh, his podcast. You can find, it's everywhere, right?

• 4:43:08Speaker 01

  Uh, YouTube, Apple, Spotify. Yep.

• 4:43:10Jocko Willink?

  Um, it's Huberman Lab, Huberman Lab Podcast. He's gonna take everything that he mentioned today for, for, for four minutes or six minutes. He's gonna talk about for two and a half to three hours with a bunch of scientific data to back it up. Awesome to listen to. Um, and you can figure out they're very, very efficiently titled. Hey, this is the subject of this podcast. Here's what you can learn. And I, I touched on some of these things today. Habit, stress, you know, hormones, like you've got all these different topics. It's, it's just awesome information. Also, they can find you at Huberman, you say Huberman?

• 4:43:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:43:48Jocko Willink?

  Huberman. Hubermanlab.com. This is kind of a, a good access point for everything. You're, you're on YouTube and Facebook. Both of those are Andrew Huberman. And then you're on Twitter, on Instagram, sucking people into the algorithm, bringing out the anger and the hatred.

• 4:44:05Speaker 01

  Collecting data on who's frustrated and then the anger system.

• 4:44:09Jocko Willink?

  Both those are at, so Twitter and Instagram, at Huberman Lab.

• 4:44:15Jocko Willink?

  Echo, you got any other questions?

• 4:44:17Speaker 02

  Of course.

• 4:44:17Jocko Willink?

  What do you got?

• 4:44:18Speaker 02

  I'm gonna keep it, I'm gonna try to keep it short. So, the variable reward, what was the?

• 4:44:22Speaker 01

  Random intermittent reward.

• 4:44:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, so doesn't that kinda illustrate the value of playing hard to get in like dating and stuff?

• 4:44:31Speaker 01

  Ah.

• 4:44:31Speaker 02

  It does, right?

• 4:44:32Speaker 01

  I was wondering if you were gonna ask about this. Um, some people understand this intuitively and they cat string people, right? They, you know, they don't reward everything. Um, it's amazing the tactics that people will come up with in order to get the text response if they're not getting it. Um, here's what we know, a picture is worth a thousand words. Use your imagination. Some people realize, ah, you know, when I text them, they don't respond, but when I send a photo of a particular kind, their response is instantaneous. Um, people learn people's response schedules very quickly. This hearkens back to childhood and we could do a whole episode on this.

• 4:45:11Speaker 01

  As a child, one of your primary, the brain's a prediction machine, or it's trying to make predictions, that's what it wants to do. And, uh, young children learn to engage in certain behaviors to predict and control the caretaking of their parents. This is important, it's not manipulative, it's vital. And adults do it too. And they do it in the same machinery that's designed for infant caregiver attachment is repurposed in adulthood. Um, so when we want something from somebody, um,

• 4:45:44Speaker 01

  then we tend to pay careful attention to their movements and when they respond and their non-responses. And random intermittent reward is what a lot of people use to keep people, um, along for the ride. Um, now, there's a, there's a positive version of this where, um, to keep the, uh, intensity high in the positive sense in relationship, yeah, it's good to miss someone, it's good to take some breaks. You don't wanna, um, overdo the dopamine system because it will deplete itself. Um, time together, time apart is useful. The cozy parts of love and the more intense romantic lusty parts of love are both vital to the arc of a relationship. But one, you could imagine how time apart could reset some of the dopamine.

• 4:46:27Speaker 01

  People seem more attractive and exciting when you've been apart from them for a while. And a lot of people kind of suffocate their relationship with serotonin, so to speak. Too much time together will give you all the warm cozy stuff, but will, it's antagonistic, as we say, to the dopamine system. But yeah, people manipulate using these systems. And that's unfortunate. But, you know, I'm not an expert in how to counsel them on that.

• 4:46:55Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. So it is, you might not be an expert on how to counsel them on it, but if people are aware of it, they can do a better job combating becoming a victim to those scenarios.

• 4:47:06Speaker 01

  Right. And I always say, you know, you should be very careful how much you attach your dopamine to something that is not under your complete control. You know, if you give your entire dopamine system over to somebody else's responses or availability, you're setting yourself up for a pretty rough life, even if it's a great relationship. Because either whether or not by decision or by death, or by circumstance, if that relationship were to go, what are you gonna do? So I think people tend to get overly focused on how much dopamine someone else can provide them. I think it's great, I have a statement about addiction, which I think matches the scientific mechanism very closely, which is that addiction is a progressive narrowing of the things that bring you pleasure.

• 4:47:48Speaker 01

  Whereas a good life is, involves a progressive expansion of the number of things that bring you pleasure. So try and continue to derive pleasure from, with, for instance, time with friends. We all know the guy who's got the new girlfriend and then disappears, and then comes back six months later, is like, hey, you know, so, like, told you so. You know, it's okay to miss one another. It's okay to miss one another. It's okay to not text all the time. When you're with friends, spend time with friends. Be available for emergencies, but spend time with friends. This cuts both ways, women with women, men with men. And assuming the standard relationship model. The, you know, when you're with your guy friends, be with them, right? Ladies, when you're with your girlfriends, be with them. And. You are missing one another is great because you're keeping that dopamine system ready.

• 4:48:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the, I mean, on a kind of a more positive note, you can kind of use it as like in the courting phase, we'll say.

• 4:48:41Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 4:48:41Speaker 02

  Like, don't just throw yourself at somebody because you kind of jam their system up a little bit, right?

• 4:48:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, you know, at some point, you don't want to game things too much, right?

• 4:48:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:48:52Speaker 01

  This gets right, this gets into some deeper issues about power and dynamics in relationships, right? You know, is giving tons of gifts to someone a sign that they're in charge or that you're in charge? Well, I don't know. It depends on your mutual, your relative finances, right? In one case, you could be the person saying, "I have resources and I can take care of you forever." In a sense, you're in the power position. In another case, you're just showering them with gifts in a desperate attempt to get them to like you. So there's a lot of context to this that makes it tricky, but I would say that giving to get is a very dangerous thing. Get pure giving without the expectation of a reward in exchange for that is great because then

• 4:49:32Speaker 01

  both people get to experience that as a positive thing. And, you know, giving to get, it puts you in a very vulnerable place.

• 4:49:39Speaker 02

  Yeah. So essentially with great power comes great responsibility.

• 4:49:45Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 4:49:46Speaker 02

  That's how guys get friendzoned, though. That's how you get friendzoned. You can be like a, what do you call, like a catch, but you give too much too quick, you get friendzoned.

• 4:49:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I confess, I have a few close female friends that, uh, over the years, most of my friends are men and have a relationship with a woman, so that's got, that's just what, how it's been organized. I don't, I haven't developed, um, many close friendships with, with women, so friendzone is a bit of a foreign concept to me. Um, but I hear it exists.

• 4:50:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's like, yeah, basically the girl doesn't have like sexual attraction to the guy, even though the guy's like the perfect guy. But it's usually because the guy positions himself below the girl, like he worships her too quick or something like this. And the girl's like, oh, he's not like a challenge, you know?

• 4:50:32Speaker 01

  Dating sounds complicated.

• 4:50:34Jocko Willink?

  Put too much serotonin in the snare.

• 4:50:37Speaker 01

  I'm a big, I think it was Tim Ferriss, our, our mutual friend, Tim Ferriss, that a long time ago said, you know, "The quality of your life is largely..." reflective of the number of really difficult conversations that you're willing to have. And I love that because I'm not very good at difficult conversations. Who is? That's why they're called difficult. But I think the person concerned about being friend zoned should sit down with the person and say, listen, here's what I really want. What is the probability that's going to happen in the next week? And if it's a, well, the 25%, okay, well, hit the ripcord. And if it's a 75% or I've been waiting for you to say this, like, let's go, you know, I mean, it seems like direct communication is lacking in.

• 4:51:23Jocko Willink?

  We're about to go, we're about to open up a whole nother scenario here.

• 4:51:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm not sure I'm the best person.

• 4:51:28Jocko Willink?

  When you, you know, if you've got the, let's say you got a girl that you're trying to talk to and you think you might be in the friend zone. Sort of assaulting her with the, hey, where, where am I at? That's, I'm going to say that might not be the best call. What I would probably do is assume we're just friends and behave that way. Don't assume that you're gonna, don't assume that there's a chance you just assume, hey, you know what? She probably doesn't really like me that much. That's the assumption you make. Back off. If, if she ends up actually feeling that way, then she's going to come and, and let you know that. So your behavior should be, oh, she just wants to be friends? Cool. Don't box her into a corner with the, with the Andrew Huberman freaking direct assault.

• 4:52:13Jocko Willink?

  Hey, where are we at, girl? Where are we at?

• 4:52:15Speaker 01

  I'm not even sure it has to be a verbal communication. I think it could just be a, you know, is this relationship over romantic sexual relationship or is this a friendship? And you don't, there are numerous ways to have that conversation. But obviously it should be consensual, age appropriate, context appropriate, species appropriate.

• 4:52:36Speaker 01

  But, but listen, what you're describing to me is foreign territory because I'm not, I just not of the, the ilk that is in the habit of, of having a lot of, you know, friendships aside from male friendships. I wouldn't, it just hasn't happened.

• 4:52:53Jocko Willink?

  This is a, was that, I think we just got a humble brag.

• 4:52:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:52:56Jocko Willink?

  I think we got a, he's like, listen, I don't know what you're talking about this friend zone thing. Never been there.

• 4:53:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:53:00Jocko Willink?

  Not a thing.

• 4:53:01Speaker 01

  No.

• 4:53:02Jocko Willink?

  I like it, bro.

• 4:53:03Speaker 01

  I'm not saying that. I'm just saying it's hard for me to imagine that you, that anyone would find themselves in this position. I mean, also be a scientist, the data are the data, right? I, I do believe if somebody wants to do something, they're basically going to do it. And if they don't, they're not going to.

• 4:53:16Jocko Willink?

  Check, check. Uh, the, going back to a little bit more serious now, what you said about, um, you know, you shouldn't give to get. This is something I brief leaders on all the time. If the reason you're taking care of your team is so that you can get something out of them, they're going to see that and it's not going to work out well. So very similar, um, very similar thought pattern there.

• 4:53:42Jocko Willink?

  Andrew, you got any, you got any closing thoughts before we shut her down?

• 4:53:46Speaker 01

  Just really want to say thank you for having me here today. It's a truly an honor and a pleasure. I don't say that formally, I say that sincerely. And as a listener of your podcast, I'm, yeah, this has been a thrill for me. I've learned a lot from both of you guys. And, uh, while I'm not going to roll jujitsu because I don't know how, uh, maybe someday. And, uh, yeah, thanks so much.

• 4:54:07Jocko Willink?

  Well, thanks for coming and back at you, you know, as a listener to your podcast, it's, it's awesome to be able to sit down and, and drill down on some of these things. And, you know, really, uh, a really important thing. I would say there's a theme that I've, that I've taken away from, from your podcast, but then that I absolutely reinforced today. I talked about it a little bit, the fact that the things that you're talking about really allow us to bring awareness to what's happening

• 4:54:36Jocko Willink?

  in our bodies, in our minds physiologically. And therefore we actually have more influence than we think over what our thought patterns are and the way we behave, which ultimately allows us as people to take more ownership.

• 4:54:57Jocko Willink?

  Over the way we feel, the way we behave, and those are really important things. And I think just understanding the nature of our own physiology better is a huge step forward in people living better lives. So, thank you for coming down and joining us and thank you for taking that information and passing it on to people for free. You know, you do this stuff for free. Your podcast is free and you've invested, obviously, a ton of time to try and learn these things. And the fact that you give it back to people for free is just a testament to the kind of person you are. And I appreciate it and I hope you keep getting after it, man.

• 4:55:42Jocko Willink?

  Thanks for coming down. Thank you.

• 4:55:46Jocko Willink?

  And with that, Andrew Huberman has left the building. He's rolled out. Echo, did you gather any good information?

• 4:55:53Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 4:55:54Jocko Willink?

  A lot of stuff going on.

• 4:55:55Speaker 02

  A lot of stuff going on.

• 4:55:56Jocko Willink?

  You can see there's probably going to be follow-on podcasts.

• 4:55:58Speaker 02

  Yes. Bro, you could have taken like one of those questions that you kind of like said and like do four hours just on that. Not to mention the stuff that you probably wouldn't even understand. That's like another, what, 12, 16 hours probably. Let's face it.

• 4:56:14Jocko Willink?

  Check, no, great guy, great information, definitely cool to talk to. And, you know, even just when he was leaving, you know, we'll definitely get some stuff done, do some more stuff in the future. Yeah, man. I really, I really do, the point that I was making kind of throughout the podcast and that I kind of closed out with, like, look, just being aware of these things makes you better off. Then you realize that you can influence the way you feel, the way you think, the way you sleep, the way you be, you have way more influence. You don't have to wake up in the morning and go, man, I don't sleep good, I don't know why. You don't need to do that. You don't need to go, I don't really feel like working out. You don't need to do that. You can say, oh, I know why I don't feel like working right out right now. Cause I expended a bunch of dopamine on something early this morning, but you know what?

• 4:56:59Jocko Willink?

  It doesn't matter. This doesn't mean I'm a bad person. It just means I need to go and get it started. Take ownership of what's happening.

• 4:57:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:57:05Jocko Willink?

  So I thought that was well worth the price of admission.

• 4:57:08Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 4:57:09Jocko Willink?

  If you're, if you're at the tail end of a four something hour podcast right now, I think that right there was worth the price that you just paid. Maybe you two X'd it.

• 4:57:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:57:17Jocko Willink?

  Maybe you listened to it at two X speed right now.

• 4:57:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's possible.

• 4:57:21Jocko Willink?

  What do you think? What percentage of people go two X speed when they're listening?

• 4:57:25Speaker 02

  Uh, well, depends on what portion, you know, uh, sometimes I suspect that sometimes they do two X, sometimes they do one X. Um, with this one, I don't know, man. This is the kind of where, Brad, you don't want to listen to a two X. You want to get, that's going to go, some of that stuff's going to go over your head, I think.

• 4:57:42Jocko Willink?

  You're going to want one X on this one.

• 4:57:43Speaker 02

  Yes, for sure.

• 4:57:44Jocko Willink?

  I'd say a lot of our podcasts actually are one X scenarios.

• 4:57:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's true. I was surprised though, as you probably could tell, that the, that he wasn't as familiar with the idea of the friend zone. Cause I think this is just, this is my hypothesis, my neurobiological hypothesis that the friends.

• 4:58:04Jocko Willink?

  Bro-science perspective.

• 4:58:05Speaker 02

  Yes, sir. The friend zone is a direct result.

• 4:58:09Jocko Willink?

  But hey, wait, was the friend zone a thing when you were a kid?

• 4:58:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:58:12Jocko Willink?

  Oh, okay. So it wasn't called that?

• 4:58:14Speaker 02

  Expression.

• 4:58:15Jocko Willink?

  No, okay, but it was a thing?

• 4:58:16Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 4:58:17Jocko Willink?

  That you were in?

• 4:58:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:58:20Jocko Willink?

  I think he was just kind of saying.

• 4:58:21Speaker 02

  To be honest, I remember one instance where I was in the friend, well, put it this way, I had like one foot in the friend zone and one foot out of the friend zone. Where I, I was surprised on how little influence I had over the scenario. And then thinking back, I was in the friend zone.

• 4:58:40Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 4:58:41Speaker 02

  So because I was this person, man, if I, if I understood this variable reward scenario.

• 4:58:46Jocko Willink?

  You might have done a little bit better.

• 4:58:47Speaker 02

  I would have had more influence over that. But it's true. I think it's a direct result of this, um, of not understanding the variable reward. If you're just like, oh yeah, um, freaking, I'm just going to do everything that I think this girl wants me to do. That in and of itself creates a lack of variable reward.

• 4:59:07Jocko Willink?

  That's a problem.

• 4:59:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:59:08Jocko Willink?

  We're considering this to be a problem.

• 4:59:10Speaker 02

  So she's going to keep you around for that whatever, the serotonin. But there's no real, there's no real dopamine because.

• 4:59:19Speaker 02

  Of that, of that phenomenon.

• 4:59:21Jocko Willink?

  Just flooding it with serotonin.

• 4:59:22Speaker 02

  It's too much.

• 4:59:23Jocko Willink?

  Too much.

• 4:59:23Speaker 02

  Not enough dopamine.

• 4:59:24Jocko Willink?

  So stay out the friend zone.

• 4:59:26Speaker 02

  Stay out of the friend zone, bro.

• 4:59:28Jocko Willink?

  Especially someone like you that's apparently spent a lot of time in the friend zone.

• 4:59:34Speaker 02

  That was a long time ago.

• 4:59:35Jocko Willink?

  Uh, hey, thanks for listening. We, we sorry it went long, but you know what? That's the way it happens. Sometimes if you want to support the podcast, uh, and you want to support yourself, you want to get, you, you, you was down for the, you was down for the discipline go.

• 4:59:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:59:48Jocko Willink?

  Down for the discipline go.

• 4:59:49Speaker 02

  And if you notice with knowing, no one really made a, a thing out of it, but he mentioned theanine, right? When he was like, and he said, oh, I like theanine. I like it. Um, some people mix it with coffee. So you don't get the jitters and all that. So, ooh, I was about to say, wow, well, I didn't want to interrupt.

• 5:00:04Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah. Plus then it sounds like you're trying to hard sell something.

• 5:00:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:00:08Jocko Willink?

  Well, actually we did. So I don't want to be that guy.

• 5:00:10Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 5:00:11Jocko Willink?

  But yes, we have the ultimate formulation for Henergy.

• 5:00:16Speaker 02

  Henergy.

• 5:00:17Jocko Willink?

  For the ultimate formula. We had to kind of have the ultimate formulation.

• 5:00:20Speaker 02

  Yes, sir. And think about it. And he said, he straight up takes Alpha GPC.

• 5:00:24Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 5:00:25Speaker 02

  Takes it as a supplement, except when he's drinking the go.

• 5:00:28Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 5:00:28Speaker 02

  Because Alpha GPC, he mentioned the theanine and all the benefits or whatever. Hey, look, we kept it cool. We're not going to make a big deal out of it, but it just happens.

• 5:00:36Jocko Willink?

  Kind of got you covered on all fronts. So that's awesome. Uh, if you want to get some of that, go to jockofuel.com. You go to Wawa and get some of it. You can go to vitamin shop and get whatever. You can get milk, by the way, which is, which is, look, I, I'd love to tell you, hey, you need additional protein and you do, I get it. But you also need something that tastes hella good.

• 5:01:04Jocko Willink?

  Get yourself some milk, get yourself some joint warfare, some super krill.

• 5:01:08Speaker 02

  I've been noticing you've been saying hella good lately.

• 5:01:11Jocko Willink?

  Really?

• 5:01:12Speaker 02

  Like, that's like the third time you said in the last three days, two days.

• 5:01:16Jocko Willink?

  Really?

• 5:01:16Speaker 02

  Yes, sir.

• 5:01:18Jocko Willink?

  Is it, it's kind of an older, like an eighties expression, isn't it?

• 5:01:21Speaker 02

  If I'm not mistaken, it's a Northern California expression.

• 5:01:24Jocko Willink?

  For sure.

• 5:01:25Speaker 02

  Hella.

• 5:01:25Jocko Willink?

  Cause in Maine, we say wicked good.

• 5:01:27Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 5:01:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, those of us that know about Maine, yeah, we know that. But I think that's a hella good is like, like when you first said it, I was like, wait, what is the reason for that?

• 5:01:39Speaker 02

  Still remains a mystery. Nonetheless, you're correct.

• 5:01:41Jocko Willink?

  Yep, it is hella good. Vitamin shop, wah wah, jockofuel.com. Get yourself some supplementation that's gonna make you bigger, faster, stronger, smarter.

• 5:01:51Speaker 02

  Smarter.

• 5:01:52Jocko Willink?

  Whole nine yards. There you go.

• 5:01:54Speaker 02

  And balanced chemically too.

• 5:01:56Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 5:01:57Speaker 02

  Cause we didn't talk that much about the sugar. Well, we did talk about the crash, right? You get all these crashes. You start doing all this stuff to your brain chemistry. You get these crashes.

• 5:02:04Jocko Willink?

  No reason for this.

• 5:02:06Speaker 02

  You don't gotta deal with that kind of stuff anymore.

• 5:02:08Jocko Willink?

  No. jockofuel.com. Check out originusa.com. You're probably gonna need a gi, right? Cause we're training jiu jitsu. And look, I would love to tell you could wear that gi down to the market, out to the club. You can't. Well, you know, you can. It's probably gonna get you friend zoned. Don't let that happen, right? No, you might have a female. Let's say you're a male and you might have a female that's real into jiu jitsu, which is super cool. And maybe she's down, you know, maybe she's wearing a gi. Maybe we're wearing gees out. Maybe that's what we're doing.

• 5:02:40Speaker 02

  Just do it sometimes. How about that?

• 5:02:41Jocko Willink?

  But that might not be the case. You might need, you might need a pair of jeans, right? We got your jeans too. Made in America. Made in the United States of America. DIY. Do it yourself. That's the, you know, only because Andrew kind of mentioned this DIY mentality that you get from the punk rock, the hardcore scene. It's kind of like do it yourself, right? That, by the way, that's why Jaco Publishing exists. That's why we have Jaco Fuel. Cause we're making stuff. We don't go, hey, you know, we'd really like to do this. So we'll just, you know, hey, hey, hey. No, we're doing it. That's what we're doing.

• 5:03:16Speaker 02

  I don't wanna split hairs here, but this might be small tangent, but I think it's important. DIY has like a contextual element to it. It's short for do it yourself.

• 5:03:29Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 5:03:29Speaker 02

  But, so put it this way, DIY doesn't mean do it yourself. And do it yourself is DIY, but not all DIY means all the things that do it yourself mean.

• 5:03:40Jocko Willink?

  Okay, so what are you talking about?

• 5:03:41Speaker 02

  So DI, if you say.

• 5:03:43Jocko Willink?

  Cause I'm already like, ready to move on.

• 5:03:46Speaker 02

  This is a technicality that may or may not mean important. DIY, when you say DIY, if I say, hey, if Jocko, you say, hey, can you give me some water? And I say, do it yourself. Okay, so let's do it. That is one of the many do it yourself. DIY means like usually it's done, not like as a favor, but like as a um, production kind of a thing.

• 5:04:10Speaker 02

  And then you just did it yourself, like kind of makeshift. It has a makeshift like kind of quality kind of feel to it. See what I'm saying?

• 5:04:19Jocko Willink?

  You good?

• 5:04:19Speaker 02

  Yes, sir.

• 5:04:20Jocko Willink?

  Okay, let's go to uh, jocko store dot com.

• 5:04:25Speaker 02

  So Jocko Store, which started as a DIY scenario, um, but it's not anymore. It's a well, uh, you know, varying levels of met uh, oiled machine.

• 5:04:37Jocko Willink?

  Check.

• 5:04:37Speaker 02

  Right now, got some good stuff on there, got some discipline equals freedom shirts and hats, hoodies, merch, if you will. But it's good quality stuff. It's not just some cheap stuff. It's good quality. Arguably the most wearable clothing.

• 5:04:51Jocko Willink?

  That seems to be the consensus kind of around.

• 5:04:54Speaker 02

  Yes, many people, and when I say many, I mean for real, like countless, not the kind of like three, like countless people have said, it's my favorite, favorite shirt. Not just because of the design and the representing on the path, but because of how it fits.

• 5:05:06Jocko Willink?

  What about when they get a shirt locker shirt?

• 5:05:09Speaker 02

  Same, it's all the same.

• 5:05:11Jocko Willink?

  And they think, man, there's only a few people that have this shirt, like Andrew was talking about. He was talking about the Thunder Trucks shirt. It's limited. That's why he saved. He still has it to this day. He has it to this day. You get a shirt locker shirt, you're kind of in that, in that arena.

• 5:05:29Speaker 02

  Exclusive and limited. It's true. Um, so what that is, if you don't know, it's a subscription scenario. You get a new shirt every month. Here's the thing about that shirt that he was talking about. What did it say? Something about something, something and I only got this.

• 5:05:40Jocko Willink?

  Sponsored by Thunder Trucks and I only got this T-shirt.

• 5:05:44Speaker 02

  This lousy T-shirt.

• 5:05:46Jocko Willink?

  And this lousy T-shirt.

• 5:05:47Speaker 02

  Okay, so this is why I remember that because there are other shirt companies that do, you know, like the kind of shirt companies that make fun shirts, like that are knock up like a. They almost borrow like the concept and the design from like Coca-Cola, but it says choke. Instead of Coke, it says choke, you know, like that idea. Like there's a few that I saw that had that same thing. It said, I'm something, something, something like something real impressive. And then it said, but I only got this lousy T-shirt. It was like, that's how I remembered it.

• 5:06:16Jocko Willink?

  Yep, that's, uh, that was the thing, you know? I ran the Boston Marathon and all I got was this. I went to Bulgaria and all I got was this lousy T-shirt.

• 5:06:27Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 5:06:28Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 5:06:29Speaker 02

  But yes, some shirts are exclusive.

• 5:06:31Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 5:06:31Speaker 02

  That's just the nature of the game.

• 5:06:33Jocko Willink?

  All those things that we just said are a little bit lame, right? Unless it's from Thunder Trucks and it's limited. And then all of a sudden it comes, it becomes kinda rad.

• 5:06:42Speaker 02

  You are correct.

• 5:06:43Jocko Willink?

  Kinda hype. Subscribe to this podcast and don't forget about the Jaco Underground. We've been rolling those out, talking about some detailed information, getting lots of Q and A. So there's a, there's a way to access us for questions. If you want to ask a question, we can answer it on JacoUnderground.com. Go and check that out if you want to support us. DIY, right? Cause you can't, you can't let the man control everything. You know what I'm saying? You can't give power to the man.

• 5:07:15Jocko Willink?

  You can't, you don't want to. You've got to create your own platform over on the side in case you have to escape out the side hatch. So we're ready. JacoUnderground.com. You want to kick in a little eight dollars and 18 cents a month? It's cool. We appreciate it. We'll be ready.

• 5:07:30Jocko Willink?

  So that's that YouTube channel. Subscribe to the YouTube channel.

• 5:07:36Jocko Willink?

  Don't forget about Origin USA. They have a YouTube channel. FlipsideCanvas.com. Dakota Meyer, making cool stuff to hang on your walls. Got a bunch of books. I've written a bunch of books. If you want to check those out, check them out. You can get them anywhere you get books. You can also check out jockopodcast.com and you can go to books from the podcast and you can find all the books there. So that's for books that not necessarily that I've written, but books that we've covered on the podcast. There's like an email thing to sign up for too on the podcast, jockopodcast.com.

• 5:08:11Speaker 02

  No, that's on Jocko's store.

• 5:08:13Jocko Willink?

  Jocko's store.

• 5:08:14Speaker 02

  Yeah. The podcast is pretty straightforward as far as information surrounding the podcast. You just go to the website.

• 5:08:19Jocko Willink?

  Check. Uh, good to go. We also have echelonfront.com. This is a leadership consultancy. We work with all kinds of companies. And we teach the leadership principles. Some of them you heard me talk about today, but if you have problems in your organization, they're leadership problems. I'm here to tell you. So if you want help with that, go to echelonfront.com for details. We also have some live events. We got the muster coming up. We got battlefield. We go and walk Gettysburg. We go and walk Little Big Horn. Get the lessons learned from those. So check that out, echelonfront.com. Also, we have a training academy to be better, to be better in life. Extremeownership.com. You want to take ownership of your life?

• 5:09:04Jocko Willink?

  You want to, and if you want to ask me a question live, go to extremeownership.com. We got a bunch of courses on there. It's going to make every aspect of your life better. It's going to make you better. So check that out, extremeownership.com. If you want to help service members, active and retired, Gold Star families, check out Americas Mighty Warriors.org. That's Mark Lee's mom, Mama Lee. Great organization. Also heroesandhorses.com. Check that one out. And, and don't forget for Andrew Huberman, you can find him at hubermanlab.com and on YouTube and on Facebook. He's at Andrew Huberman. And then on Twitter and on Instagram, he's at Huberman Lab.

• 5:09:49Jocko Willink?

  And as far as Echo and I go, we're both on Twitter. We're on the Gram. We're on Facebook.

• 5:09:57Jocko Willink?

  Echoes at Echo Charles. I'm at Jaco willing. Look, no matter what you're going on there for, just, just watch your back because the algorithms can sneak up.

• 5:10:04Speaker 02

  Well, we learned a lot about that today.

• 5:10:06Jocko Willink?

  That dopamine hitter. You're trying to get that dopamine hitter. Next thing you know, you, you're a dope. So be careful. And thanks once again to Andrew Huberman for coming on. Really, again, he's putting a lot of great knowledge out there and we definitely appreciate it. So thanks, Andrew, for driving all the way down here to make this happen. And I look forward to returning the favor in the future. And of course, thanks to the servicemen and servicewomen out there on the front lines who make it possible for us to sit back here and get educated and learn and live our lives. Thank you for what you do. And also, thanks for the service of our

• 5:10:50Jocko Willink?

  police and law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, border patrol, secret service, all the first responders out there. You all do what you do so that we can do what we do and we appreciate it. And to everyone else out there, everyone else out there. Uh, look, there's a lot of ways to get better. We learned today that you can become a, you, you should have become more aware of things. You should realize you have more influence. You realize you have influence over the way you feel, the way you think. You can take ownership of that. Learned a lot about that today. And you know what? Knowledge and

• 5:11:32Jocko Willink?

  learning and understanding are great. But you know what else? They don't mean anything without action. So yes, learn and educate and enlighten yourself, but also don't forget to go out there every day and freaking get after it. And until next time, Zeko and Jaco out.