427: Work Hard and Be Useful. With Arnold Schwarzenegger

Join >Jocko Underground< https://www.jockounderground.com/subscribe Jocko and Arnold talk hard work, tenacity, paying attention, and developing skills to succeed. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Austrian and American actor, businessman, filmmaker, former politician, and former professional bodybuilder known for his roles in high-profile action movies. 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 427 with Echo Charles and me Jocko Willink. Good evening, Echo. Good evening.

• 0:08Jocko Willink?

  I bet you and I have a lot in common. We're not the strongest, smartest, or richest people we know. We're not the fastest or most connected. We're not the best looking or most talented. We don't have the best genetics. But what we do have is something a lot of those other people will never have. The will to work. If there's one unavoidable truth in this world, it's that there is no substitute for putting in the work. There is no shortcut or growth hack or magic pill that can get you around the hard work of doing your job well, of winning something you care about, or of making your dreams come true.

• 0:48Jocko Willink?

  People have tried to cut corners and skip steps in this process for as long as hard work has been hard. Eventually, those people either fall behind or get left in the dust. Because working your ass off is the only thing that works 100% of the time for 100% of the things worth achieving. Work works. That is the bottom line. No matter what you do, no matter who you are, my entire life has been shaped by that single idea.

• 1:25Jocko Willink?

  And that right there is an excerpt from a book called Be Useful: Seven Tools for Life by Arnold Schwarzenegger.

• 1:37Jocko Willink?

  And if you don't know anything about Arnold Schwarzenegger, well, he won Mr. Universe Bodybuilding Competition at age 20, then won Mr. Olympia seven times. He brought bodybuilding to the masses through his victories and through his film Pumping Iron. He then took over Hollywood with hit movies like Conan, The Barbarian, The Terminator, the entire Terminator series, Commando, Predator, Twins, Total Recall, True Lies, The Expendables, and dozens of other movies. He's written articles. He's written books. He was the chairman of the President's Council on Physical Fitness and Sports.

• 2:20Jocko Willink?

  He created after-school All-Stars to help kids stay out of trouble. He helped grow and inspire and coach in the Special Olympics. He's built several businesses. He served two terms as my governor here in California. He has a new Netflix documentary series about his life. He's been called the Austrian Oak, Schwartzie and the Governator. And that was the intro that I had planned Echo Charles to use. When we got to sit down with Arnold Schwarzenegger, but as he showed up in his office, which is kind of like a little mini museum, a little history museum.

• 3:04Jocko Willink?

  And when he showed up, we all just sat down, we started talking and at some point I looked over you and said, let's hit record. So we hit record and the podcast kicked off. So this is a conversation with myself, Echo Charles and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Some good lessons to learn.

• 3:26Speaker 01

  Because you never know what happens at what time. We already missed 10 minutes of really good history. But this is where you've heard of Annie Libowitz, right? Yeah. So she's in a very, very famous photographer who became very famous during the seventies when she did all of the covers of the famous, famous musicians for Rolling Stone. And then she, you know, so she was in a, on the exclusive contract for Jan Winner, who owned the magazine, was the publisher. Great guy.

• 4:02Speaker 01

  And, um, and so I got to know her because she came down to South Africa in 1975 for Rolling Stone to take pictures at the Mr. Olympia competition that I won. And she photographed us and photographed behind the scenes and, and everything like this. Her expertise was not to pose or anything. It was just to catch shots that were behind the scenes, but just spectacular combinations of things. She just had an eye. And, um, but anyway, her, her strength was, and the photographs that were always the best. When she said, I'm done.

• 4:51Speaker 01

  So you were photographing.

• 4:54Speaker 01

  I remember we were doing these photo shoots with Dali Parton in Nashville.

• 5:03Speaker 01

  And then we did another photo shoot in New York at a studio.

• 5:09Speaker 01

  "That's great. I'm done."

• 5:14Speaker 01

  So she puts the camera away and I walk over and I said, and Dali Parton says, let me see those biceps. And so I'm hitting a bicep shot. And Annie Leibowitz says, "Oh, this is great. This is great." "Just quickly go with the... This is just for myself, but just go behind her and do the double bicep again." "And Dali, you just go with your arms back so it looks like they're your biceps." "And it's really great." And she, this little camera, not the big one, the Hasselblad or the Rolex, no, not that, just the little one, Leica.

• 5:55Speaker 01

  And, "This is funny. Oh, that makes me laugh. This is for myself." That was the shot that was then on the fucking cover.

• 6:10Jocko Willink?

  Would it just because people would like relax?

• 6:13Speaker 01

  Look at this. Put it in front of the lens so they have it. Exactly.

• 6:17Speaker 02

  That's the one right there.

• 6:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:21Speaker 01

  Exactly. But anyway, so this is, so it's an art. It's an art to find the moments, you know, and everything. And she was an expert, the same in South Africa when she was down there. I mean, she says, "Can I come into your room?" I was in there naked, right? And I said, "Yeah, sure." And so she came in and she was photographing away. And now you see my big book, the Arnold book, all those ass shots.

• 6:55Speaker 01

  And she didn't do front stuff or anything like that. She would not do that. But I mean, just shots that you get away with and tastefully and stuff like that. And so she just was always there. And Franco and I and...

• 7:12Speaker 01

  All the guys really included her and and she was just really good in infiltrating and getting the shots. You know, she was just an expert in that.

• 7:23Jocko Willink?

  Which is weird now because right now every single person has a camera running all the time in their phone. They're always taking pictures of everything. It's like, it's almost oversaturated.

• 7:32Speaker 01

  Well, now, now everyone does it and it's a different ballgame. The quality is not the same. And all of that stuff, Annie Libowicz will always be Annie Libowicz. I remember she came with Andy Warhol to our wedding. To Hannah's port. And both of them, Andy Warhol and her, were taking pictures there at the wedding. Kind of, you know, not, kind of behind the scenes stuff and just what they saw. And they were fantastic photographs. So they're just very talented. There's no other day they would go and would be able to be at the same wedding and get the same shots, you know, with the same kind of layouts and stuff like that.

• 8:15Speaker 01

  It was just, it was just, they always knew exactly when to put out that little, because she had this little Leica camera. Where she didn't have to do anything and just, and so did Andy Warhol. It's just like this. But a lot of times not looking through it because the looking through it means I'm serious about this photograph. No. It was like Annie would just have his camera here. He said, "That's a good idea. You just do this." And, you know, he says, "He's never gonna catch anything here." How are you gonna go and see anything if he doesn't look through? And so he don't take it seriously. But the fact is, he, he took great shots. And he had always his tape recorder there, all the time.

• 8:57Speaker 01

  One hand the tape recorder and then the other hand, you know, the camera. So he just could record his entire life at all times.

• 9:08Speaker 01

  Let me think about that. So this is weird shit for us, for us. But I mean, this were kind of like the original podcasters. You know, they would get this stuff out there somehow because you had the magazine, the interview magazine. And he, and you know, he, he loved me. And he, he thought the world of bodybuilding, the whole idea of creating yourself and molding yourself. He was fascinated by that, not to do it, to be an artist on your own body. As he always put it, he says, you know, I'm an artist on the canvas. But you're an artist on your body.

• 9:48Speaker 01

  You're shaping your body like you're, you're using dumbles and barbells and machines. As if you use, they, they use clay and then a different tools to then shape the clay to make a sculpture. So he was fascinated about all of this stuff.

• 10:06Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's, not too many people have Annie Leibowitz and Andy Warhol at their wedding taking pictures.

• 10:12Speaker 01

  No, no, absolutely, yeah, and I mean, we had, we had everybody there. You know, it was like, it was amazing. Um, some of Oprah Winfrey was at that time still a rising star. Um, and so she had her show, um, in Chicago. And, um, she went from Baltimore to Chicago and then she had her show there. And, uh, kind of became very popular there, but she was a rising star. So she was a good friend of Maria's and she came to the wedding and. So there was all kinds of Barbara Walters and all this kind of people, a lot of people that are dead now already.

• 10:52Speaker 01

  No, I mean, this just shows you your age, the people from your wedding are wiped out already. But then, and it was, it was, it was a really great wedding. They, they really have done a great job, uh, in hand, it's part of Maria's parents and her relatives. They know how to do something like that.

• 11:13Jocko Willink?

  Well, that's like American royalty, right?

• 11:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, but they have taste, have really good taste, you know, with the parties and events and. And then they have such an, such a rich. Kind of a friends, not rich in as far as money, but rich meaning such a variety of different people from politics, from the nonprofit sector, from the profit sector, the private sector, from every sector, it was just and then from domestic and foreign and everything. So I mean, it was just people from all over the world and from various different sectors, just you know, we had like 500 some people there the way it was crazy. I didn't, I didn't, I didn't recognize half of them, I have to say.

• 12:00Jocko Willink?

  And did you look around at some point thinking to yourself like, what am I doing here?

• 12:05Speaker 01

  It was not, it was like, I mean, I, I, I felt great that because I said to myself, I have such a, my people that I invited, they were from entertainment, they were from bodybuilding, they were from my past. So it was not as kind of rich of a variety of different people than they knew. And so I think that together with my type of people that I knew and the kind of people that they knew, it made it really the best kind of mix. And it was fantastic. It was really fantastic. I mean, I enjoyed literally every minute of it, of that wedding. I had such a great time because they just did such a great job.

• 12:48Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's, that's amazing to be sitting here with you and having, you know, I watched all that from the outside, you know, this is somebody that grew up here. And again, like for me, that was the merging of two worlds, right? The sort of the royalty of that family and then you and what you had done at that time. It was, it was pretty amazing to watch from the outside. And we don't have kings and queens in America, you know, but.

• 13:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 13:14Jocko Willink?

  We had you, I guess.

• 13:18Jocko Willink?

  Um, so normally when we do these things, uh, like especially when I have a book, something like this that that you wrote, I'll, I like to read some of the, some of the book and kind of introduce some of the topics and then maybe talk about them in a little bit more detail. That's sort of what I would normally do.

• 13:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, wherever you can mix it up, you're gonna do whatever you want.

• 13:40Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, but if you start talking, we're gonna listen.

• 13:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, but no, no, just, I mean, I, yeah, the, you know, I,

• 13:49Speaker 01

  it's, I never like to look back.

• 13:54Speaker 01

  Because it's just, there's really not much in it for me, right? It's just, I always like to look forward. It's kind of like, do I want to look out the windshield or do I want to look through the rear view mirror when I drive a car?

• 14:09Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 14:09Speaker 01

  I'd rather look forward because I know where I'm going then, rather than always looking at the back. And so that's the way it is with my life. So the only time that I really think about the past is when we do an interview like that. Or when I write a book, like Being Useful, or Total Recall, the book that came out around 10 years ago. Or when we did the documentary for Netflix, where I had to sit down like for 40 some hours and answer questions. So that's when I had to think back.

• 14:47Speaker 01

  Or when they say, can you get us photographs for the documentary? So now I have to go through my 100 plus photo albums and get them all scanned and then go through all that. So that's when I really, the only time I think back. Um, because other than that, I never do. It's not, it's just by nature, it's, it's not like, um, I have something against it, it's just that I don't feel comfortable, I feel like it's a waste of time and it just doesn't take me there, you know, so I never go and look at my photo albums, I never look at, you know, kind of old letters, I never think much about any of that. I just, I would just have a plan for tomorrow and for the next week or the next month or the next year or where I want to go.

• 15:33Jocko Willink?

  And they sat you down for 40 hours for that?

• 15:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, because what happens is, is that

• 15:40Speaker 01

  You know, they, they interview you. They say, then, ah, we need you for, you know, five sessions, four hours each. And then afterwards, they say, you know, God, when you started talking about now your, your childhood and about your father and it is that, I found this fascinating, can we talk some more about that? Can we do a whole session just on that? So, then they add. Because they find something that you said, they found, they didn't think about ahead of time, or they didn't know. And, uh, neither did I. You know, because I never think about those things, except then, when someone drills down on it. I never paid much attention to it, and never mentioned it to anyone. And I said, it's fascinating, your father was an alcoholic.

• 16:24Speaker 01

  I said, well, they didn't really call it that in Austria. I said, they just, I said to someone that got drunk once a week, and came home and was like brutalizing everybody for one time. And the rest of the time, he was very sweet and very nice. And that's an alcoholic. Yeah, this is fascinating. So, how many times did he hit you? How did he hit you? And I said, then if one thing became, it went to the next. And then all of a sudden, you talk about it. So, uh, but it's not by nature that I even think about that. Or I did I think about it in a negative way.

• 16:55Jocko Willink?

  Right.

• 16:56Speaker 01

  I mean, I think about him in a positive way, because, hell, if he wouldn't have treated me the way he did, I would have stayed there.

• 17:04Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 17:05Speaker 01

  Shit, imagine that, me having to stay in Austria. And I would have been one of the regular guys over there, which is fine for them, but I mean, it's not for me. I had kind of like, I was very ambitious and had big plans. So, that upbringing kind of made me realize, I gotta get away from home. I gotta escape to America. I gotta get away from all of that. So, it was good, it was a big plus. I look at it as a plus, rather than a, a negative.

• 17:34Jocko Willink?

  Do you think that that, that the big ambitions came from being in that environment where your dad was, you know?

• 17:40Speaker 01

  Eh.

• 17:41Jocko Willink?

  Maybe not the nicest dad on some nights?

• 17:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, he, he would beat us and he was, you know, would take off his belt and, and, uh, hit us with the belt or with, with the branches. You know, there would be different degrees of, of punishments and all that stuff.

• 18:00Speaker 01

  But the next day, we laughed about it. I mean, not he, but I mean, my brother and I. We laughed about it. And said, how much did it hurt? And he made the, and he made the branches wet. That really hurt. I said, my ass is still sore. Look at the, the lines I have on my ass. And my brother says, yeah, but the belt, what do you think? The belt buckle. He caught me on my forehead with a belt buckle. You know, so we were like comparing about who had more kind of a, you know, leftovers. And as far as, you know, kind of marks and stuff like that, yeah.

• 18:33Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. No, that, that documentary was, I mean, they went into some awesome detail in that. But yeah, that idea that you had of, I gotta get to America. You know, you saw Reg Park, that can, you just thought, that's me. I could do this.

• 18:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, because I mean, uh, I think that Reg Park,

• 18:54Speaker 01

  who grew up in Leeds, England, in a factory town, just like Graz was where I grew up.

• 19:05Speaker 01

  And, uh, and he made it.

• 19:11Speaker 01

  You know, he found a bodybuilding gym where he worked out, some dungeon. And he worked out there and hours and hours every day sweating. And, um, that's all he had. And that's all he thought about was just working out. His father was telling him he has to be a businessman. His mother said that he has to be a nice man and be successful. And, um, you know, he, he just, I think his mother was Jewish and his father was not. I think that's where it was, you see. And so anyway, she was a wonderful woman.

• 19:55Speaker 01

  I mean, we visited her later on when I became a champion. We went up to visit them and to see where it all began in Leeds. And his father was not alive anymore, but his mother was. And so I met her, wonderful, wonderful woman. And so it was really great to see that he, just through struggle and believing in himself, you know, kind of hours and hours of working out, he made it, became Mr. Great Britain. He became Britain's strongest man.

• 20:36Speaker 01

  He was bench pressing 500 pounds, which was the record in Europe at that time. And he was squaring with 600 pounds and deadlifting at tremendous weights and all this. So I admired all this, the strength and all this stuff. So I said, well, if he can do that hours and hours a day, then that's exactly what I'm gonna do. I'm just gonna go and put the hours into it. And off we went and trained and trained and trained. And then things happened.

• 21:07Jocko Willink?

  Did you have information about like his actual workouts?

• 21:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:11Jocko Willink?

  Where'd you get that from?

• 21:12Speaker 01

  There was a magazine that came out in 1962. Just when I started working out, I just started working out and lifting weights. And there was this magazine in a store that had Reg Park on the cover. And it was basically him as a Hercules, just enormous. Not like the regular bodybuilders, you know, that were kind of ripped and all this. But he had these wide shoulders and these huge lats and big thighs and all this. And he was Hercules. He was this undercover Hercules. And it said, this is how Mr. Universe became Hercules.

• 21:55Speaker 01

  And so it actually had very little in there about how it became Hercules. It talked more about how did he become Mr. Universe?

• 22:06Speaker 01

  How did he train? And so I copied this, I mean, I couldn't copy everything because I didn't have certain machines. Like I didn't have a pull-in machine. And I didn't have a leg extension machine, I didn't have a calf machine. I didn't have a leg curl machine, I didn't have any of that. I was just training in a weightlifting club. And we were not even allowed to do bodybuilding exercises. So we had to kind of like do first our regular weightlifting training. And then when we were finished with that. And we crossed off all the marks that we wrote down on the wall. Uh, you know, the five sets of of cleans. And then five sets of of jerks.

• 22:50Speaker 01

  And then five sets of presses and five sets of snatch. And all the the Olympic lifting movements. And deadlift and shoulder shrugs, you know, the power, the pull-up to get the strength in the shoulders and traps. After we did all that, then we were allowed to go to the chin-up bar and do the chin-ups. And to do some curls. And to do some triceps extensions though. So most of the bodybuilding itself, I was actually doing at home. In a weightlifting club, I was doing mostly the weightlifting. And the powerlifting, bench press, deadlift, squats.

• 23:33Speaker 01

  And in those days, there were some powerlifting competitions where the three disciplines were bench press, uh, squat and curl.

• 23:48Jocko Willink?

  Oh.

• 23:49Speaker 01

  They call it a cheating curl.

• 23:50Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 23:51Speaker 01

  So you pick up in the bar with the twenty, with the forty-five pound plates on the outside. And you will be curling that. As a matter of fact, when I used to go to England. Because I got so good at that, because it was part of the powerlifting championship. So I did that out on stage before I was posing, before I was doing my posing exhibition. So they'd say, when I was Mr. Universe, they invited me to England to pose at the Mr. Great Britain competition, and beforehand, they would have me do deadlifts and some curls.

• 24:32Speaker 01

  And I would be doing my 275, I remember, a few reps curls. And people loved all that, that is, deadlifting, 650 pounds or so. Then later on, when I was working out with Franco over here, I got all the way up to 710 in the deadlift, and Franco was even better than that, he was like 730 or so, even though he only weighed 180, it's crazy. But anyway, so we had a great time, and I was kind of copying Reg Park, whatever I could copy. And it was really great because he did say three sets of incline press with dumbbells,

• 25:16Speaker 01

  then three sets of incline press with the barbell. Well, he had a rack, so he could take it off the rack and do incline press. I didn't have a rack, so we had to kind of put a board against the wall, then clean the weight, then fall back, do that incline, do that abdominal board, so to speak, and then we did the incline press. So we kind of improvised a little bit, but it all worked out fine, you know, it made me stronger in cleaning and in lifting and all of that stuff. And so I trained, I did this leg workout and this calf workout and all that stuff. But then, when I met him, so I was 19 years old when I met him for the first time.

• 26:01Speaker 01

  And he came over to England from South Africa, because he lived in South Africa. Even though he was British, but he married a woman uh in from South Africa. And so he came periodically to England from South Africa. And one day, I was staying at my friend's house, Wag Bennett. And Reg Park came to visit. He just arrived at ten o'clock at night from South Africa. And then at one o'clock in the morning, he came over to the house to work out. Because he has a gym down below, a public gym. It's like goes as a dungeon.

• 26:40Speaker 01

  And so Reg came over and there I met Reg Park, my idol, for the first time. I was nineteen years old. And I just won second in the Mr. Universe Contest, literally like just two months before. And I met him, I worked out with him at one in the morning. And it was like a dream come true. You can imagine being a media idol, right? And so then that's when he invited me and he said, listen, this year.

• 27:19Speaker 01

  He says, you have to this coming year, you have to win the Mr. Universe Contest. He says, I wanted with the age of twenty-three, or whatever he was. He says, uh, you could be the youngest Mr. Universe ever with the age of twenty. He says, if you win, I'm gonna bring you down to South Africa. And you do a bunch of posing exhibitions for me, make some money. And that's exactly what happened. You know, I took this, I mean, I sense Reg Park said that I could win the Mr. Universe. So that means I could win. And so I was absolutely convinced that I'm gonna win. It's my year. And I trained like hours and hours and hours every day.

• 28:04Speaker 01

  And sure enough, I won Mr. Universe with the age of twenty. And I went down to South Africa.

• 28:13Speaker 01

  The following December, three months later, and did a bunch of posing exhibitions and all that stuff. And they took me around South Africa, it was like fantastic. And that's what led us to then go to the Federation and convince the Federation to have the Mr. Olenbir Kandis, the benching it down there. And so the IFBB, which is the International Federation of Bodybuilding, negotiated with the South African government because no sports, international sports were allowed down there because of apartheid. Right. And so they negotiated then

• 28:55Speaker 01

  to let the judges be mixed, blacks, whites, colored. In South Africa, there's a different category. There's colored people and then there's black people. Got it. You know, and then there's Asian people and there's Indian people. So there was five or six categories at that time. And so Ben Weider was very adamant that there will be no competition with the IFBB if it is not mixed. But it had to be mixed on every level. So it had to be, the judges had to be mixed, the audience had to be mixed, and the competitors have to be mixed, and the sponsors have to be mixed. Wow.

• 29:39Speaker 01

  So it's all the categories they penciled out. And there was a guy by the name of Dr. Kornhoff. And he was a very open-minded character. Because he, whenever I went down for Rege Park to South Africa, that Dr. Kornhoff, who was the Minister of Mining, of Sports, and of Immigration, he told me that I have to go to the downships and go to the black areas and also pose. And so they brought me in with cages, like an animal.

• 30:21Speaker 01

  To the middle of town, there's this little black towns. And they were celebrating that someone came in from the outside and visited them. They were drunk, they were celebrating and screaming. Nothing was safe. And they brought mainly these cages so that not the ice they protected. Bottles were flying, everything, not to hurt me. No one was trying to hurt me. It was just celebrating. They were just so excited about someone from the outside coming in and visiting them. And paying attention to them. And so I would do this posing exhibition. I mean, it was like an experience and a half, let me tell you something.

• 31:05Speaker 01

  I mean, I was scared every time I went in there. Because it was also night. The action was at night. I mean, it was like 11 o'clock at night, we would go to these places. At 1:00 in the morning. And so this is a kind of experience. Reg Park was responsible for getting me down to South Africa. And eventually, we had the Mr. Olympia contest. This Dr. Konov then helped us to bring everyone together. And we had in Pretoria, in the capital of South Africa. We had the Mr. Olympia in 1975. Where Rolling Stone came down and then was kind of covering it. They wanted to do a cover story.

• 31:50Speaker 01

  Which didn't end up being a cover story because Jimmy Carter won Super Tuesday. And so he won in 1976 several states in a row. And became kind of like the guy to win the Democratic Convention. And eventually become President of the United States. So they decided that that was enough of a news event for him to win all those states. That they bumped me off the cover and they put him on the cover. Which was totally fair. Great story that Hunter Thompson wrote about Jimmy Carter and.

• 32:32Speaker 01

  So it was, it was all good. It was totally feared. He was a much bigger deal than I was. And even though I like being undercover, I remember that, it's what happens every so often, you know? When you're, when you're a star, they promise you a cover. Then, then no one ever can promise you a cover. They can say, we will work hard to get you undercover. Like for instance, was there was Time Magazine? And Newsweek, they had me when, when Pumping Iron came out and I think it was,

• 33:05Speaker 01

  was it seventy-seven or seventy-six? When Gary Gilmore was shot and executed in Utah. So anyways, it was the first execution. Seventy-six. Seventy-six. Late seventy-six, right? July. Oh, July seventy-six, okay. So anyway, so I was supposed to be undercover in seventy-six. All around Pumping Iron? Yeah, all around Pumping Iron, exactly. And I became kind of like this new kind of a sensation in America. Like a guy with muscles that actually can talk. So there was the sensation, right? So, so I, because no bodybuilder ever hired a publicist until that time.

• 33:49Speaker 01

  And no one wanted to talk to the press, because they were always fucked up somehow. So, so here I came and I had a personality and I was into the idea of selling bodybuilding. And marketing it the right way, since I studied that as a kid, to be a marketer and to be a, a, a business person. And how do you kind of like communicate and launch an idea? So I studied that all the time. And so when my time came, I said, now I'm gonna use that in bodybuilding. So we were trying to get all the covers, all the precedents. So there was this explosion in bodybuilding and also about me, you know? Like Andy Warhol and Jimmy Wires painting me and Leo Neiman painting me and me getting invited to all his parties.

• 34:34Speaker 01

  Studio fifty-four and, you know, hanging out with Mick Jagger and all. It was like, it was just like this big explosion. Bodybuilding all of a sudden was accepted and... To the Mr. Olympia competition, after the Mr. Olympia competition at Madison Square Garden in nineteen seventy-four, all these actors came to the party, Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty and Al Pacino and Dustin Hoffman and all. I mean, it was like, it was like bodybuilding has arrived, right? So there was the big breakthrough. And it was, finally, you know, because I just couldn't stand it anymore. The stupid stuff that people would say about bodybuilding, the press, not because they were just mean-spirited.

• 35:19Speaker 01

  There was maybe a little bit there, jealousy, feeling inadequate around the body, whether they had a good body or they had abs and muscularity. But they also kind of didn't understand it. So they made up shit. You know, they're all gay, you know, this is a substitute for some other shortcomings. They're stupid and they're narcissists and, you know, gonna die early if you work out, all this kind of stupid stuff. So I said, I'm, oh, there's so much to work with to kind of dispel some of those stereotypical things. So that was my job then, you know, and I got full huddled into the whole thing. But I mean, it was like, the seventies was like the decade where it was the big explosion.

• 36:04Speaker 01

  And then the eighties was, of course, the big explosion of then the action movies. Because now, because of bodybuilding, I got into the movies. And then we did Conan the Barbarian. And with Conan the Barbarian, it launched my career as an actor internationally. I went to every country in the world. And I basically just promoted the shit out of it. And then all of a sudden, people say, oh, my God, there's, there's a guy with a body. And then all of a sudden, they gave me all these action scripts, Terminator and then Commander, then Running Man, Red Heat and True Lies. And then finally, I had to kind of say, hey, what about the comedy?

• 36:46Speaker 01

  Then that's when the Twins came about and Kindergarten Cop and Journey and those kind of things.

• 36:53Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's a, I remember a term when I was a kid. They would say you would get muscle bound. If you lifted too much weight, oh, you're you get muscle bound, you won't be able to do anything anymore. And that was like the the negative press about lifting weights about bodybuilding. That was a real thing you had to overcome.

• 37:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. And and and, you know, it's like, um.

• 37:17Speaker 01

  Athletes have proven later on. That. Yes, you could get muscle bound if you don't. Do your sport at the same time.

• 37:30Speaker 01

  But that if you do weight training. And you do your sport. That it only can enhance your performance. And we have seen it then from then on, we saw the shot putters all of a sudden. You know. Breaking records after records. We saw how much better the football players got from weightlifting. And for strength training. We saw how great the wrestlers got from all of that. And we saw all the athletes all of a sudden picking up Bruce Jenner. I mean, was. Before he won the Olympics in the in in in a Decathlon. He up in Montreal. I mean, he was working out with weights and really, really heavy.

• 38:16Speaker 01

  And he was one of the first athletes that kind of had. The sensitivity.

• 38:23Speaker 01

  To understand. Yes. If I combine speed. With strength. That can only be helping me rather than just have speed and no strength. So he worked on the strength and he kept working on the speed. And I mean, he outperformed everybody. And we saw then later on. Evander Holyfield was like the one of the first. Boxes that really got seriously into the weightlifting. And then all of a sudden started beating everybody. You know. And Mike Tyson and those guys were all lifting heavy weights. And really serious way, I mean, and they became ferocious fighters and really enormous. Ken Norton, those guys, I mean, they all really started getting into it.

• 39:09Speaker 01

  And so, you know, it was it was an easy thing when those athletes were performing so well. It was an easy thing then to prove that is not true. And then, of course. In rehab, they used, you know, throughout the eighties and nineties, heavily weight resistance training. You know, to rehab your knee after knee injury, after surgery, or replacement, knees replacement, all of that. It was all weight training, weight resistance training in rehab. So all the hospitals all over the country started having, you know, weight rooms. Not massive, not tons of weights, but weights. So that you can, you know, kind of do weight resistance.

• 39:52Speaker 01

  And then eventually it became a time, like in the nineties, where the military also started getting into the weight room. And I remember I was the chairman of the President's Council on Physical Fitness and Sports under Bush. And then I sat down with Bush. And because he was, he was into weight training. He was working out regularly at Camp David, and he was at the White House, way before he started his meetings. And so I used to work out with him. And, and so he said to me, he says, I don't know, there was a New York Times piece.

• 40:37Speaker 01

  I said, yes. And he says, where the guys in Iraq were working out with sandbags. So I said, you know why they're working out with sandbags? He says, no. I said, well, first of all, because resistance training is good. I said, but the other reason is because you haven't sent them any barbells and dumbbells yet. I said, what do you think? That they would not rather lift with dumbbells and barbells than to work out with sandbags? He says, can you organize that? I said, you're talking to the right guy. So I said, I'm gonna go.

• 41:22Speaker 01

  And I'm gonna go and ask for donations.

• 41:27Speaker 01

  And so I called every manufacturer of weight equipment. And I got forty tons of weights together. And now, they put it all together in a crate. And Colin Powell came to me and says, Arnold, I'm not gonna be that stupid and ship this over with a ship. He says, but you never have heard that. I'm gonna fly the fucking thing over there. So it's gonna be there in two days.

• 42:07Speaker 01

  From here to Germany, from London to Iran, he says, it's gonna be over there in two days. And we're gonna distribute it nicely. I'm gonna put someone in charge and all this. And then all of a sudden, three weeks later, I was getting letters from guys that are in the front line saying, thank you, Arnold, for helping us get those weights. We just received weights. We're now working out in the barracks with the dumbbells and with the barbells and all that stuff. We don't have enough, obviously, because there's so many of us that are into weight training. He says, but it is a great, great beginning. Thank you so much. So I mean, this is the kind of stuff that...

• 42:49Speaker 01

  So and then after that, I tell you, I went then back and I went to Iraq in the second round, the second war, in 2003. And that brought to the men and women the Terminator movie, Terminator 3. I wanted them to be the first ones to see it before anyone else, any critic or anyone else sees it. I was very fanatic about that. And so I went to various different places over there to show them the movie. And that's when I saw all of a sudden gyms,

• 43:33Speaker 01

  where they were working out. And the craziest thing was when I went back again in 2009, when it was... It was the 9th, I went back there. And now I saw gymnasiums that were much bigger than any...

• 43:53Speaker 01

  Gymnasium in the world.

• 43:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. In the world, I mean, I've never ever seen a gymnasium where I walk in where there was a tent at this almost the size of a half a football field. And the entire tent was, there was like, literally like twenty bench press benches with the barbells on top. There was like fifty life cycles and steer masters and treadmills. And it was, everything was like twenty or ten or fifty or something like that. It was insane. And that's when I realized, as a matter of fact, in the nineties already, I realized that we have now gotten to the point in the world, especially in America,

• 44:40Speaker 01

  but in some cases in the world, where there is no fire station that has not weights. There is no police station that didn't have weights. There was no military station that didn't have weights. No camp, no nothing that didn't have weights. And there's no YMCA that didn't have weights, no WCA that didn't have weights, no club, no, uh, no football team that didn't have weights, no basketball team that didn't have weights, no college team, no high school team. Everyone had weights. And on top of it, when I traveled around the world and went to hotels,

• 45:22Speaker 01

  it didn't matter if it was in India or in London or in Paris or in Dubai. Everyone had weights, every hotel had wait, a wait room. So this is what happened in a period of like thirty years from the seventies to the nineties. It was an explosion in every direction. And, um, you know, when I wrote the book Be Useful, that was my way of being useful. I said to myself, I believe in this. I feel passionate about this. And there is something in there for everybody because I felt like the bigger I make the sport.

• 46:06Speaker 01

  The healthier the people are gonna get, but at the same time, the more money the bodybuilders are gonna make. Because the reason why the football players are making so many millions of dollars is because everyone is watching it. So if bodybuilding will be watched by that many people, they will be making the same amount of money. So therefore, it has all to do with one thing, and that is, how do we get the general public sold on the idea of it's cool to have muscles? And there are competitions there. There's the Mr. Olympia, there's the Mr. Universe, the World Championships, Mr. World Competition, Mr. International, Mr. America, American Championship. There's different federations. You can tune in wherever you want. Here it is. And the Arnold's Classic.

• 46:50Speaker 01

  And my competition that I've been holding for thirty-five years. So this is also, it was all about, it had many effects. It made people healthier. It gave them something to do. It made them join a village, so to speak, because so many people are lost, as you know. You know, that's why there's so much benefit when you once belonged to the military. Because you belong to a village. You belong to a community, a togetherness. And the rest of your life, you will always think back at that time, and you will have those connections and those buddies out there.

• 47:34Speaker 01

  I mean, when I think, the amount of times that I think about when I was in the Austrian Army. Now, it's obviously not like the American Army, but just the little things. I am never, ever worried. I mean, do you know what kind of a great feeling that is? That you never have to worry? Because it doesn't matter what it is. If it is ironing a shirt, I know how to do. Sewing on a button, I know how to do. Shortening the sleeves of a fucking pants, I know how to do. Driving the biggest vehicle, I've driven tanks.

• 48:21Speaker 01

  The biggest vehicle doesn't scare me. I drive any vehicle, the Ashkarsh. Whenever you give me through the smallest alley in Beverly Hills, I'm not worried about banging into anything. I have an Ashkarsh, you know, I drive it in the little, the littlest kind of streets. Doesn't worry me. My tank, I go out and drive it and it's sitting there, it's a fifty-ton tank. That can destroy anything. I drive it, I spin it around, I go, and we have fun, we have fun with the tank. I mean, it's like, everything that I learned, I was crawling up. And like I said, not with the danger like you guys did where you were actually on the front. That's a whole other ballgame.

• 49:07Speaker 01

  And I can imagine how much courage that gives you. But just me crawling up hills in forests, in the rain, in the middle of the night, at ten o'clock at night with a gun in my hand, and crawling up and someone standing in front of you with the flashlight and screaming at you for fucking two hours. You're crawling, you have dirt, you have mud going through here and stuff like that. Or when you fuck up with the tank, then you have to go and release the emergency hatch on the bottom, on the bottom, and you crawl out. And then you crawl under the tank. And it's raining outside, in the mud. Then you climb up the other side, up the, the top, the torrent, down through it,

• 49:52Speaker 01

  again to your driver's seat and out again, and do that fifty fucking times. If you screw up. So this is the kind of things that I went through. Um, you know, so it's like, okay. I've gone through so much torture in the military, you know, and, and pain. At four thirty in the morning, getting up and running endless amount of times around this football field that was in front of our military, of our Kassian military base. And of this, so you, you go through that and you say to yourself, you know, I was so blessed.

• 50:31Speaker 01

  That someone taught me with the age of eighteen,

• 50:37Speaker 01

  that if we give you misery, and pain, and discomfort, and torture,

• 50:45Speaker 01

  that this will help you for the rest of your life. It's almost kind of like an investment. You know, because from then on, you say, you say, "Okay, now things don't bother me."

• 50:59Speaker 01

  You know, "It doesn't bother me because I've gone through all of this stuff." And this is why I tell so many young kids today. I said, "You're making a big mistake to always look for comfort." Because comfort is the evil of everything.

• 51:17Speaker 01

  Comfort is not good. Looking for the easy way out is not good. You say, "We got to go and confront kind of resistance." And it's like Nietzsche said, you know, "That what does not kill you will make you stronger." And this is exactly what it is. You know, if we can overcome kind of like all these obstacles, you know, then we get strong. And we can endure much more. And we look at the world totally differently. And we don't whine about every little thing. And so this is, I mean, so I think what has happened to me in the military this one year, I was only one year, uh, from eighteen to nineteen in the military.

• 52:00Speaker 01

  And then, of course, the training that I was able to do there, the weightlifting, because they hailed sports. And so they let me train in the afternoon, when everyone else was washing the tanks. In the morning, we were driving the tanks. And then the afternoon, they said, "Schwarzenegger, for you it's better to train." And so I had my gym, I had my, my barbells, and my benches and everything at that military station. And so I trained for a few hours while they were washing my tank. And the oiling up all the, the different areas where you have to loop and put all the grease in it all the time. So, so this is the kind of thing. It's, it's, it's kind of like...

• 52:41Speaker 01

  So I can totally relate in a way to what you guys went through because I went through it with a small percentage and it helped me so much. So I know how much it helps you.

• 52:55Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Yeah. And I think the, I think one of the things that made the military start to adopt so much of lifting, working out was number one, obviously you get the physical benefits, but the mental benefits too of going and exerting yourself is it makes every part of your day better when you start off that way. And then like you said, when you're, when you're working out with, you know, your other guys and you're doing hard stuff together, it brings you close together. So you're going to have that community feeling even more in the military when you're working out with guys. When you get with a group of people and you do hard things together, you get, you become closer. That's what it's about.

• 53:36Jocko Willink?

  So that really benefited for my, basically my whole career, we were lifting weights. Like that's what you go to, you want to talk about having weights. You go to a SEAL team, like they have weights. It's awesome. That's where people congregate. That's what we're doing. And, and people do a whole variety of, some guys were triathlete type guys. Some guys were big powerlifting guys. Some guys were functional strength guys, but everyone's in there doing it. And the weird thing is right now is you have problems with recruiting because there's people in America that aren't into fitness, that don't recognize how important it is. How do you think that's happening? That on the one hand, we have the most knowledge

• 54:20Jocko Willink?

  we've ever had, the most opportunity because there's gyms on every corner. We have all these opportunities and yet there's people that are not even fit to be in the military because they haven't worked out and they're 20 years old. What do you think of that?

• 54:35Speaker 01

  I think that it's a lot of it has to do with parenting. You know, because I think that if you are a parent, you go out with your kids when they're like three, four years old and you run around with them. And you do things into fun, I think, go take them on hikes, take them skiing. If you have the money, you know, because skiing sometimes can be expensive. Take them swimming, you know, do things with them, you know, and have them join clubs later on. Uh, if it is wrestling club or if it is a boxing club or whatever it is, or gymnastics, whatever it is. Every kid you figure out as time goes on what they're into. And every kid is into something else, but they find something that they're into.

• 55:20Speaker 01

  And so I think the parenting is uh lacking a lot of times. Because this is all leadership, because I remember with my kids, I had two of my kids that were not so much into the physical thing, but we found still fun things to do. And they became great skiers and they became great on the ice rink and doing ice skating and stuff like that. They were great in swimming and uh, you know, then others excelled in everything. In baseball and basketball and football and all of that. So it really depends on the kids, but you can really push kids and really make them feel like, oh, there's so much joy with being fit and going out and playing games and doing sports and stuff like that.

• 56:03Speaker 01

  So I think it's it's it's leadership at home that is missing a lot of times. And of course, as you know, there's a lot of kids that grow up with uh, you know, both parents uh working. And that's why we started, you know, thirty some years ago, after school programs. So that uh, you know, that the kids have a place to go after school. Where they can go and get the homework assistance, because there's no one home helping them. Uh, they will they they will get the tutoring between after three o'clock, between three and six. And where they get the sports programs, where they get the fitness programs, the exercise, the arts program.

• 56:45Speaker 01

  You know, playing music instruments and doing painting or whatever they they're into. So all of this stuff is to kind of like assist the parents where both of the parents are working. That there's someone there for this and there's some adult supervision for those kids. So that's that's what why I started after school programs thirty some years ago. And it has become a huge, huge hit.

• 57:10Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, uh, your book, this new book that you wrote, it's called Be Useful, Seven Tools for Life. And you you start off the the first one, the first tool that you talk about in here is having a vision. And you say in the book, so many of our best people are lost, so many of the good ones don't know why they're what they're doing with their lives. They're unhealthy, they're unhappy, seventy percent of them hate their jobs, their relationships are unrewarding, they don't smile, they don't laugh. They have no energy, they feel useless, they feel helpless, as if life were pushing them down a road to nowhere. If you know what to look for, you will see people like this everywhere, maybe even you when you look in the mirror. It's okay, you're not broken, neither are they. This is just what happens when you don't have a clear vision for your life.

• 57:52Jocko Willink?

  And you've taken either whatever you can get or whatever you thought you deserved. We can fix that because everything good, all great change starts with a clear vision. So you've been doing that, I mean, what you already talked about, you saw Reg Park, that was your vision. You saw Hollywood, that was your vision. When did you figure out that that was the methodology a person needs to have in order to move forward?

• 58:21Speaker 01

  I I I figured it out with bodybuilding because not only did I have the vision of Reg Park, because I had it in a magazine right in front of me.

• 58:31Jocko Willink?

  A literal vision.

• 58:32Speaker 01

  But I, what was what was the most powerful thing was that I could see myself

• 58:42Speaker 01

  on that stage, on that Mr. Universe stage, like Reg Park, but me and winning.

• 58:52Speaker 01

  And so it was, it was the most extraordinary thing, how real it was. I saw the photograph of Reg Park standing there with, in the background, the thousands of people applauding, and that's, I'm like, that's where I'm gonna stand. I don't know when, but I'm gonna stand on that stage. And I'm gonna go and win the Mr. Universe trophy. And so, I was absolutely convinced. And I could only compare it always to how people feel when they're religious. And they're absolutely convinced, you know, that, hey, I'm not worried about dying. I know where God is gonna take me, and they're absolutely convinced about that.

• 59:34Speaker 01

  And God is gonna guide me, and I will go through some difficult times, but God is gonna be by my side. And they have kind of, almost a relaxed feeling about it. No matter what trouble they go through. And I felt exactly like that because I never was worried about it. It was not kind of like I was scrambling, saying, oh my God, is another year passed? I hope that I got closer to my goal, or... No. It was kind of like, every set that I was doing, every exercise that I was doing, every rep that I was doing, I felt like great joy. Because it was like a rep, a set, a weight, that get me one step closer to my goal.

• 1:00:19Speaker 01

  To make my goal become a reality. So this was like, I'm chasing this thing, and I'm having a great time, because every single time I get closer and closer. So it was like, that's what people always said when they saw, when they came journalists that would come to the gym and say, you're the only one that is always smiling and having a good time in the gym. I said, well, I have a good reason to smile. And they says, why? I said, because every time I go to the gym, I get one step closer to winning the Mr. Olympia title. Winning the Mr. Universe title. I mean, so to me, it's like kind of, coming in here is like, it sucks me one step closer, one step closer, one step closer. And so I know where I'm going. And so this is why there's a certain joy there.

• 1:01:01Speaker 01

  And I've, I didn't pay much attention to it, just to realize that I always had a certain calmness about it. But then when I got into the movie business...

• 1:01:15Speaker 01

  I felt kind of like I have to kind of dissect now and analyze what did they do in bodybuilding that made it work? Because everyone here in Hollywood says Arnold, it's never gonna happen. You're never gonna become a star. You'll never become a leading man. You have an accent, your body is too big. Your name Schwarzenegger, whatever. I mean, who the fuck can pronounce that? I said, what do you think they're gonna put on the billboard someday? You know, Schwarzenegger or something like that? Forget it. I mean, you have to have a snappy name like John Wayne. I mean, it's all kind of like Clint Eastwood. There's a cool name, Charles Bronson. There's a really American name. I said, is that gonna happen with you? So there was always no, no, no.

• 1:01:59Speaker 01

  And that's why one of the rules in the book also is don't listen to the naysayers. But it's always no, no, no. And so I said, okay, in bodybuilding, I heard the same thing. Arnold, you would never be a bodybuilding champion because you're an Austrian. You become a ski champion, maybe, but not a bodybuilding champion. This is American stuff. It's British stuff. They do that, not over here. And so what did I do? And I said, I visualized myself as Mr. Universe.

• 1:02:31Speaker 01

  I said, and then everything I did, I worked my ass off to get closer and closer, every workout. So this is what I have to do. I'd get five hours I worked out. So I'm gonna go work five hours a day now on becoming an actor.

• 1:02:50Speaker 01

  But instead of doing five sets of curls and five sets of deadlifts and five sets of bench press and five sets of chin-ups and all that stuff, I'm gonna do an hour of accent removal. Because they said that because of my accent, it's gonna be an obstacle. And I'm gonna go and take an hour of English classes. Then an hour of acting classes. An hour of stunts. And an hour of this. And I said, I'm gonna do five hours a day, every day.

• 1:03:28Speaker 01

  I said, and I'm going to visualize myself as another Clint Eastwood.

• 1:03:36Speaker 01

  And I'm gonna go and get in the movies and I'm gonna do big parts like that. All like Reg Park. Reg Park was Mr. Universe and then became Hercules. I said, wouldn't that be great? So I, I, I mean, I had the idols there. So now it was just me to believe that I can be like that. And I believed it because I used the same method as I used in bodybuilding. I use now and applied it to acting. And I worked my ass off. I believed in myself and I moved closer and closer. And every time someone said, it's not gonna happen, it's not gonna happen. I got one step closer, you know, eventually.

• 1:04:20Speaker 01

  I was doing a Hercules movie, Hercules in New York. The comedy, that was like hilarious. But I, I was, I was in front of the camera and I was starring. And then there was Lucille Ball called me a few years later and asked me to do Happy Anniversary and Goodbye, which was a TV show with Art Carney, a two-hour TV show. She says, I want you to play the maître and that's a seven-minute part. She says, if you do that well, I says, everyone will know who you are. So I did it and it became a huge hit. And then I did, from there I got then Streets of San Francisco.

• 1:05:04Speaker 01

  Then I did Stay Hungry with Sally Fields and Jeff Bridges. Bob Rafelson directing. Then we did Pumping Iron. Then I did The Villain with Kirk Douglas and with Ann Margaret. And things started picking up. And I started guest starring and co-starring with those guys. Then I did The Jane Mansfield Story where I played Mickey Haggiday, which was a Hungarian bodybuilder who had an accent just like me. Because Hungary, Budapest, where he came from, and Vienna, very close together. It used to be the same empire, the Austrian Hungarian empire. So they used to belong together. So he married Jane Mansfield.

• 1:05:49Speaker 01

  So now they wanted me to do James Hesford, so I played Mickey Haggaday. And he was delighted, he was still alive at that time. He was delighted that I'm playing him. So now I'm having a starring role on a TV, a major TV show with Lonnie Anderson, who was the biggest TV star, female TV star at that time. And so this is how then I was doing Conan the Barbarian. So everything that they said, it would be impossible, all of a sudden changed. And when they asked John Millias, the director of Conan the Barbarian,

• 1:06:29Speaker 01

  "How did you get to the idea to have Schwarzenegger star in Conan the Barbarian?" I mean, the last movie you did was The Winter Lion with John Connery and with Candace Bergen. Now you're hiring Schwarzenegger? Are you kidding me? What kind of a leap is that? And he says, "If we wouldn't have had Schwarzenegger, we would have had to build one." Because Conan was a heroic guy that my friend Frisetta painted him. So to do justice to that, the only one that was around was Schwarzenegger. And he was an actor at the same time. So I was so happy to find someone with a body like that. So exactly what they said is going to backfire on me was an asset.

• 1:07:14Speaker 01

  And the same thing was also with Terminator. When they asked Jim Cameron, "What made Terminator goes through the roof and becomes so popular?" And he says, "Well, I'll be honest with you, besides Arnold's body, it was his accent." He says, "Because he talks like a machine." He says, "Not made it believable." He says, "With his body, the way when he came out of this thing and we saw him naked on top of Los Angeles, looking down." He says, "We saw that this is not a regular body that we're seeing on the screen. This is a machine." And then when we heard him talk, that confirmed that he was a machine. He says, "That's what sort of thing, it was totally..." He said, "Now, all of a sudden, they said the body and the accent."

• 1:07:58Speaker 01

  The very thing that they said would not work, all of a sudden worked, you know? So this is the kind of things. So I just applied the same rules with positivity. But, as I said, the key thing is that we know where we are going.

• 1:08:18Speaker 01

  No matter how difficult it is, we got to know where we're going because I don't know if you have seen people that foreigners that come over to Hollywood and you see them getting off the bus, you know, the tourist bus, and then they get to the intersection and then they kind of like, they look around.

• 1:08:41Speaker 01

  Kind of like,

• 1:08:47Speaker 01

  where should I start? Look at all the shops. Oh, my God. This is all, ah, ah. Guys, where, where's everyone going? Where, where? Should we, should we cross the intersection? So this is, so they, they don't know what to do. So this is what a huge amount of people have that look. Not to look for the next store, this is just a symbolic thing, but in reality, about life, they say, ah, where should, should I go to college? Should I go and join a football team? Should I train? Should I meet up with my friends? Should I go to another country, another state? Should, ah, ah, ah.

• 1:09:31Speaker 01

  You got to have a vision. Because as soon as you have a vision and as soon as you have a goal, which means you have to be really in touch with your passion and what is inside rather than just keep looking at that iPad and that, that iPhone and checking out what everyone else is doing. Well, you're not gonna get an idea what everyone else is doing. No, you have to find out what you are gonna do. Forget about everyone else. Let's find out what you're gonna do. And so this is why I say, find your passion, find the place where you want to go,

• 1:10:13Speaker 01

  no matter how difficult it is, and it makes it fun then to chase after that, that, that vision. And, you know, so to me, what I did here with the book Be Useful is, I talk about those things. Because if you can do everything else, you can work your ass off and you can be a good person, can save you money, and you can do all of this stuff, but if you don't know where you're going, you're, you're not, you're gonna fail.

• 1:10:46Speaker 01

  Imagine that a team of planes are taking off from the aircraft carrier.

• 1:10:57Speaker 01

  They're out, great scene, right? We always see it in Top Gun and stuff like that. It's the only way, we gotta go and see it, ordinary folks like us, right? And then it's a, now imagine, you say, "Stop, freeze frame."

• 1:11:11Speaker 01

  Planes are hanging out there and they're here. And now they say, but they don't know where to go and what to do.

• 1:11:20Speaker 01

  You think this is gonna be a successful mission? No, it's over, it's over. No matter how sophisticated that airplane is, no matter how well the people worked on the deck to get those planes out there, which is a miracle how they do that. But if they don't know, if the pilots don't know what to do after they take off, and they all go in different directions and there's, no one is in sync. So this is, but this is what your life is like if you take off and you don't know where you're going. And it starts already with, in high school, it starts way back.

• 1:12:04Speaker 01

  Because we got to know when we go to college. It's wonderful to go to college. But if you don't know why you go to college, don't go.

• 1:12:16Speaker 01

  Go and become an apprentice in some other kind of a field. Like I did, I was an apprentice as a salesman.

• 1:12:29Speaker 01

  And I went to college later on when I figured it out what I want to do.

• 1:12:34Speaker 01

  But I mean, it's like, it's like you got to know, I've, I've had kids that would go to college and say, "What do you study?" I say, "Oh, yeah, I study English." I said, "What's wrong with the English?" "Nothing, it's just a, you know, something that I can use for anything later on, because I don't know yet what am I studying." I said, "What the fuck is that? You're eighteen years old and you don't know what you want to do later on in life? Well, how long is it gonna figure, is it gonna take you to figure that one out? You know, you gotta know, do you want to be a lawyer or this? I mean, my nephew, Patrick Knapp.

• 1:13:11Speaker 01

  I sat down with his daughter. She says, I would like to go to USC. I said, that's fantastic. I say, I help any way I can. I said, you know, make sure they have all As. You know, have a 4.0 average. Otherwise, you can't get in. I said, what do you want to study there? She says, I want to study business and get myself ready for law. Because as soon as I'm graduated, I want to go there to law school. I want to be an entertainment lawyer.

• 1:13:41Speaker 01

  Wow. Do you know how much joy I had? That there was an 18-year-old, she was not yet 18, but an almost 18-year-old girl that figured it out. And in her eyes. When you saw her eyes, how excited she was that she's gonna go to college and she's gonna graduate after four years in business and then she's gonna become a lawyer. And not only just a lawyer, like floating around. Entertainment lawyer, like my dad.

• 1:14:16Speaker 01

  But that, now we're talking. So this is what I'm talking about. It just makes it for her, her journey from now on, finishing her high school this year and then going to college. It's gonna be so much fun because she knows where she's going. So that's what I'm talking about.

• 1:14:34Jocko Willink?

  And it's like the vision that you had dictated to you the work you were gonna have to do. Because there's some people that have a vision, but they don't want to do the work.

• 1:14:44Speaker 01

  Well, but here's the thing. That if you have a very clear vision and you're absolutely convinced and have the faith in your vision, then all the work that you need to do becomes easier because there's a purpose for it. You see what I'm saying? Because the worst thing is, you know how many people are in the gym? And they're sitting on the life cycling and they're going, they do a life cycle.

• 1:15:12Speaker 01

  I said, let me ask you, why are you training? And he said, oh, my doctor said that I need to lose some weight. Well, that's the goal.

• 1:15:22Speaker 01

  A goal is if you say, this summer, I'm gonna be twenty pounds lighter, and I'm gonna have a six pack, and I'm gonna have some muscle separation, stuff like that, and I'm gonna have the chicks all freak out when they see this body. Now, it sounds stupid, the goal, but it works. It works. So you have to have a specific goal, whatever it is, how crazy it is. So for someone to go and every day write the life thing because the doctor taught them to, is not good. That person has to kind of sit down and see themselves in a better shape, see themselves on the beach, and see the people around them say, look, you always say,

• 1:16:04Speaker 01

  look at, look at this guy. Because, can you believe that? Son of a bitch is showing off his fucking six pack. You know, so, look at that, you know? So that's, that's the vision you should have, how people are jealous. And maybe even someone is trying to kick sand in your face,

• 1:16:25Speaker 01

  and you just bury his face under the sand. Right? I mean, all this stuff, you could, it's all stupid visions, but they work. They work. This is why Charles Atlas was so successful with his kicking sand in the face, because it's the most basic thing, and, and it worked, and he sold hundreds of millions of courses because of the same kind of image that people had. So there was a goal to shoot for. I'm gonna be next to you on the beach, and I'm gonna be so muscular, and then all the girls are gonna come by and say, oh, I want him. You know, it's crazy stuff, but I mean, it works.

• 1:17:03Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:17:03Speaker 01

  So this is why I say, have a vision.

• 1:17:07Jocko Willink?

  Uh, an expression that you use in the book, pardon my German. Venn schon, ven- ven schon?

• 1:17:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's perfect. You said it perfect. It means if you go and do something, you might as well just go all the way with it. You just go all out.

• 1:17:22Jocko Willink?

  If you're gonna do something, do it.

• 1:17:24Speaker 01

  Do it, exactly. And so, it's a, it's a, it's a common thing that people say in Austria and in Germany and in Switzerland. And so, I wanted people to know that that's what I always heard, that's what I always said. And someone says, "Why do you train five hours a day?" I said, "Venn schon, ven schon." You know, if I go and go for the Mr. Universe contest, I'm gonna win. You know, there's no, there's no losing here. You know, I'm gonna go all out. And so, that was the idea. And the same is also in acting. I always went all out in, in acting. And, and you know what is interesting, because you talk about the vision. I, out of nowhere, when in nineteen, in, in two thousand and three,

• 1:18:07Speaker 01

  when the economy here in California went down, when we had blackouts, and when we had, uh, no political direction really, and we had really, real problems here, the people were moving out their businesses from California. People were moving away from California. I always said and saw myself as the governor. I didn't say it to anybody. But more and more, I was, I was in the middle of promoting my movie Terminator Three.

• 1:18:49Speaker 01

  Like I was telling you, I was in Iraq and I was in Kuwait and there was different places, you know, showing them, you know, the movie. And, um, then I came back here and I promoted it, you know, in France, in England, in Germany, everywhere like that, and all over America. It then came out in America, in Mexico. I remember traveling to Mexico and promoting it in Mexico and those. And then, as I was doing all of this, I said to myself, "I, I'm having always like two visions here. I'm focusing on a Terminator movie and making this the most successful movie, making sure that it grosses more money than any other movie this year." And I have also this vision of being governor.

• 1:19:35Speaker 01

  And sure enough, as soon as I was finished with the promotion, uh, I went on the Tonight Show and announced it. And I had no team yet, nothing. But I mean, so it was the same thing, kind of like, but I didn't worry about it. Even when they said, they said, but you have no team, how can you go and start getting it? I say, I, I, I put the team together, don't worry about it. The election is not until two months from now. So I announced on, on August sixth and then October seventh was the election. Two months later and I won. You know, so it was, but it was the same thing. And I, this is the work that I had to do. This is what I needed to do to get there. And this is exactly what I did.

• 1:20:20Speaker 01

  I was sitting, literally to one o'clock in the morning every day by my swimming pool with a team of guys that came in in shifts to teach me about how California is run and what went south in California. And to learn about, you know, pensions and to learn about your labor and to learn about prisons, about law enforcement, about guns and about gun safety and this, that, all the different things that I needed to know. So that they could have a debate when we go to the debates. And, and so, you know, so it was the same thing. I just had a very clear vision to become governor. That's, and it became a reality.

• 1:21:01Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, but again, you did the work.

• 1:21:03Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:21:03Jocko Willink?

  You did the work.

• 1:21:04Speaker 01

  You have to do the work.

• 1:21:05Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:05Speaker 01

  That's why I say in my book, work your ass out.

• 1:21:07Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's.

• 1:21:08Speaker 01

  It's like Ted Turner always said, right? Early to bed, early to rise, work like hell and advertise. And that's it, this is it, you know?

• 1:21:17Jocko Willink?

  Did you, when you were working in a tile store, it was a tile store, right?

• 1:21:21Speaker 01

  It was a hardware store.

• 1:21:22Jocko Willink?

  Hardware store.

• 1:21:22Speaker 01

  So they had, they had the fake tiles, they had real tiles. So the people that couldn't afford, like, there was a lot of people in Austria at that time, they couldn't afford real tiles on the kitchen. So they had this, this wooden boards that were kind of, that looked like tiles, but they put that on and it was like half the price and stuff. It's so, but I sold all of that and I learned how to sell and how to, you know, figure out very quickly when a couple came in.

• 1:21:52Speaker 01

  Do you sell and talk to the woman or to the guy? And how do you identify that very quickly? And so you I learned how to be sensitive. And that's just how can I help you and all this stuff? And then eventually, you know, they would say, well, we are here to we want to put some tiles in our kitchen and also upstairs in our bathroom, in our shower. What do you recommend? And I would show them the various different things. And then I will go and do the quiz. So I know who to talk to here, the both or the one or the other. And then I said, well, what color you actually thinking about? And then he says, what do you think, honey? So then I knew. She goes to her.

• 1:22:36Speaker 01

  She says, well, pink. I think that for upstairs, we should pink. You should have pink, he says. And for the kitchen, also pink? And then she says, no, are you crazy? The kitchen is white. We got to have whites. You know, my friends have upstairs for the bathroom. They just got some black tile, which also looks very attractive and all this. But pink is really the color. I like pink. And he says, OK, whatever she wants, he would say. You know, I pay, but she makes the decisions. So I knew right away. OK, then so now I took her around and I said, you will love this color. Let me show you. Let me show you the difference between the real tile and the fake tile. And let me show you this and show you that.

• 1:23:20Speaker 01

  And then if you need, you have anyone, by the way, already that is installing it? Who is installing it? She says, I don't have anybody. Ah, I have three names here. This is the three names. He says, with the real tiles, with the carpets, it's this and blah, blah, blah. So I talked mostly to her and she felt like absolutely delighted. I couldn't do any wrong now because for the first time she felt like someone took her seriously. Because in most cases, with the way Austria used to be, it was kind of very male oriented, chauvinistic. And so the male knew everything. They thought. In reality, I know from my house where I grew up.

• 1:24:04Speaker 01

  My mother, for instance, ran the finances in our house. My father couldn't hold a candle to her. Or when it comes to writing, she was the spelling master of the house. Even when he did his always, when he was in uniform and he was doing his police work and he wrote his reports, he asked my mother many times for spelling, uh, how to spell a word a certain way and stuff like that. So she was clearly in charge of those things. And, uh, but she didn't dwell on it. She let him believe that he's the king, the king of the house and stuff like that. And so that's what women used to do. Yeah. But so this woman was delighted that I paid all this attention. And I told her this and says, I'm gonna get some new tiles coming in next week on Wednesday.

• 1:24:46Speaker 01

  If you come back on Wednesday, then I can make sure that you get the same color white. Because there's sometimes there are different shades of white. And she says, I'm worried about that. I said, come back next week, then I get a new kind of delivery and it's all the same white and blah. And so she was delighted. She wrote out the order, he paid for it. It was a successful sell, but I learned that from my boss. When he said to me, he says, watch when I sell now. And he always asked me, he says, did you see now how I figured out that, that he was in charge and not she? And then the next time he says, did you see why I figured out that she was in charge and not him? And all of that stuff. And so I would learn that.

• 1:25:27Speaker 01

  And so all of those things were very important to me for the rest of my life. Because every time you sell anything, you got to know who you're talking to. You're talking to the women, you're talking to the guys. You talk to young or you talk to old. You talk to conservative people, you talk to liberal people. You talk to colored people, white people. All of this kind of stuff, you have to kind of know and get a feel for the whole thing. Because everything changes a little bit here and there.

• 1:25:52Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, there's pragmatic, so the book has all kinds of information in it, but there's pragmatic stuff that you can actually use, you put in the book, one of them, in this chapter, in this tool, which is sell, sell, sell, you say, "Bridging, bridging is a communication technique that anyone can use to take control of a hostile discussion, or to avoid a question you don't want to answer." And then you go on, and you give an example, you're, you're, you're running for governor, and someone says, "Arnold, you've never run for office before at any level, what makes you think you're equipped to run the biggest state in the country?" And your answer is, "That's a great question." But you know, a better question is, "How can the greatest state in the country afford to continue to down this road with the same kind of politicians who got us in this mess in the first place?"

• 1:26:35Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:26:36Jocko Willink?

  That's a crafty little move.

• 1:26:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, so then, in the political arena, that is a crafty little move. In that, in general, to give an example, like, something that I used way back when I did my first interviews, I would go, let's say, on a Muff Griffin show, or on a Tonight Show, and the guy would ask me, and I would be on there to, let's say, promote Stay Hungry, the movie, and I come on there, and he says, "So tell me, I mean, you still have this fantastic physique, and I know you did the movie just now, but when did you work, start working out, and, and, and, and why?" So, without saying it, but in my mind, now, I said, I myself, "Okay,

• 1:27:22Speaker 01

  if I tell him that I started with the age of fifteen, it's not gonna sell one more ticket for the movie Stay Hungry."

• 1:27:29Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:27:30Speaker 01

  I say, "If I tell him that I started working out because I saw Reg Park, it's not, no one knows who Reg Park is, and it's not gonna sell a ticket either." And so I went through all of this stuff, within a split of a second, and said to myself, "This is all a waste, so I have to go and bridge." So what I, basically, at that time, I didn't even know the terminology, I just said to myself, "Okay, here's what I'm gonna say." I said, "Danny, this is a really great question, I said, "I started at fifteen, but what was interesting is, is I did not know then, that I'm going to use this body in a movie like Stay Hungry, the one that's coming out this Friday."

• 1:28:08Jocko Willink?

  (laughing)

• 1:28:09Speaker 01

  I tell you, in that movie, I convinced the producer and the director.

• 1:28:15Speaker 01

  To not only have me as the Mr. Universe in there and winning the Mr. Universe title, and to get a little bit of inside look in the background of bodybuilding and how those guys work out and their intrigues and all that stuff, but I also had convinced them to have like fifty other bodybuilders running through the city of Birmingham, Alabama. I mean, think about it, fifty bodybuilders running through Birmingham, Alabama, on top of buses and this and that, and it was an absolute crazy scene that we have in there. And I never thought that the day I started working out that we're gonna celebrate bodybuilding like that, and that we're gonna show it to the people, and they're all gonna see it

• 1:28:56Speaker 01

  in a movie called Stay Hungry. So now I mention the name a second time. So this is how I sold, and at the same time I quickly answered, I started with fifteen and went right over to the thing. So to me, what is interesting always is, is every question is a potential good question. No matter how shitty it sounds when someone says it, you know, it's like, it's a, uh, if someone could go and say to me, he says, Arnold, I mean, didn't you feel terrible when you got divorced? It was kind of a failure. And I says, you're absolutely right. I said, but this is what is really interesting about it is, is that the documentary

• 1:29:36Speaker 01

  called Arnold, which Netflix is bringing out next week, I say, it gets into details and it dissects exactly what happened there. I'm not gonna say it now, I said, because I maybe don't want to see the documentary, but I mean, go and see that. I said, it's fascinating of what led up to that whole thing and where was the big explosion and bang, it was over. I said, by the way, I still regret, but I mean, is it, so, I, I, so that's what you do, right? Instead of just blowing it, I want to sell at the same time of having a shitty question, I want to turn it into a productive answer. And that is what it's all about.

• 1:30:20Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. That's a amazing thing about this book right here that I'm reading. It's called Be Useful by Arnold Schwarzenegger.

• 1:30:26Speaker 01

  You see, I don't want to use the name Be Useful, as you can see.

• 1:30:30Jocko Willink?

  What did you want to use for the name?

• 1:30:31Speaker 01

  Well, because if I say Be Useful...

• 1:30:36Speaker 01

  You know, five times, then people know that, okay, I'm hoping the book be useful. And I want the people to kind of a little bit more discover the book when they go to the bookstore. They say, where's the be useful section? And then go and say to somebody, hey, I want to get 10 copies of be useful. And the guy says, ope, hey, I only have five. He says, I have to order another five. And he says, well, order 10 more because now I want to get 15. And so this is how you then promote be useful.

• 1:31:07Jocko Willink?

  One of the things I wanted to jump in here to, because I think this is a really important lesson that you got in the book. The tool is called shift gears in the book. And one of the things, and I know people that are into bodybuilding will relate to this, but even if you're not, sometimes you lose. And sometimes things don't work out the way you want them to. And what do you do in those situations? In this situation here, you lost to Frank Zane in 1968. You blamed everybody else. You know, and your first reaction was blame everyone else, blame the judges, blame the fact that you had to travel, blame the fact that you had bad food in the airport, blame all these other things. You did that for a night. The next morning, you pretty much woke up and said, all right, what happened? What do I need to change?

• 1:31:50Jocko Willink?

  And you actually go and bring Frank Zane to, to where? Here, California, to train with you so you can figure out what he did so he could never beat you again. That's a great reframing of a, of a bad situation.

• 1:32:06Speaker 01

  Well, I, I think that what is fun is to be able to laugh at yourself.

• 1:32:17Speaker 01

  So in this particular case, I mean, imagine you lose to Mr. Universe. You just won a week before a Mr. Universe contest, the second Mr. Universe contest. Now you're coming to America and there is another federation that has also Mr. Universe contest. And you say, might as well grab that one too, very quickly while I'm at it. And then lose. It was a total shocker. But what is laughable about it is even though I cried all night, as I said in the book, right? I cried all night. But that's something to be, that is laughable. Because our brain works a certain way. First of all, kind of feel sorry for me.

• 1:33:03Speaker 01

  Look what a victim I am. Arnold is coming over here from Europe. He doesn't speak the language. He's all alone in Miami. And he's suffering here. And they're treating him really badly. And there's this prejudiced judges that are just, of course, looking for American bodybuilders, but not for Europeans, hating European bodybuilders. And they make him lose now. And they're telling him he was a little bit too fat. And he didn't have the definition. And now I'm all here by myself, lying in bed with Roy Callender, with my black friend that was convening with me in a Mr. Europe contest and Mr. Universe, and traveled all over the world with me. And luckily, I had him to cry on to.

• 1:33:44Speaker 01

  And I'm crying all night, and I say, can you believe that? I lost the competition. So, it's funny, because you have to be able to get to a point where you can laugh at that and say, "The mind pulls interesting tricks."

• 1:34:04Speaker 01

  Now I woke up. Now I'm with the program. Now I'm seeing reality. Now I don't see anymore, "I was perfect, and they fucked me." And Frank Zane is a terrible person. He put a trick on me and all of that. I said, "No." I said, "This is over now." We went past this stage where we are trying to defend ourselves and kind of make ourselves feel good. Now it's the stage of reality. And then you actually feel good. Better than when you were kind of going through the kind of being a victim stage. And so I went through this stage where I said, "I feel good." Now I see it clearly. Frank Zane is a teacher.

• 1:34:50Speaker 01

  He's teaching kids. There's nothing wrong with him. And he had a fucking great body. He weighed 185. And I weighed 225. But he was more ripped. Yes, I was bigger, but he was more ripped.

• 1:35:03Speaker 01

  And he had a tan. I didn't have a tan. His posing was better. So why shouldn't he get points for that? Let's assume for a second he got 20 points for definition, and I got, let's say, 18. Let's say he got 20 points for posing, and I got maybe 18. And maybe I got 20 points for size, and he got 18. So he's still one by two points. As I said, it all pencils out. He is the fair winner.

• 1:35:31Speaker 01

  So I said, but I mean, I have, I don't have the experience

• 1:35:38Speaker 01

  to train in order to get this kind of a body.

• 1:35:43Speaker 01

  So I'm going to humbly ask him

• 1:35:47Speaker 01

  if he will be willing to come out to California and to work out with me, and maybe I can learn a thing or two. And

• 1:35:57Speaker 01

  he came out to California, he said, I always loved going to World Coach Gym. I want to go to Coach Gym. I'm gonna, that would be great to train. Can I, can you put me up? I said, yeah, you can stay in my place.

• 1:36:10Speaker 01

  So he came out, he stayed in my place for two, three weeks until he found his own apartment. And then we worked out together like crazy. We had the greatest time. I took him out for lunch and for dinner and for breakfast and all that stuff. We had the most wonderful time. And I got to see firsthand the exercises he does for his serratus, the exercises he does for his abdominals, the kind of food that he eats in order to get so defined, and on and on and on. And we became best of friends. As a matter of fact, so much so that we

• 1:36:49Speaker 01

  that he made me promise not to compete against him.

• 1:36:55Speaker 01

  And I said, this is not what I'm looking for. I said, you have to understand, even though you beat me, but I'm looking for the bigger stuff.

• 1:37:06Speaker 01

  I'm looking for Sergio Oliver. He's the Mr. Olympia. That is the guy I need in order to really sit on top of the world. And he said, oh, that's good. I'm getting that. That's good. He says, because next year I want to compete in the Mr. Universe in the amateur in London. And I don't want you to compete in that. I said, no, I won't compete in that. So we went together to the Mr. Universe in 1969, a year later. We trained together with Franco.

• 1:37:37Speaker 01

  And I went to New York, won the Mr. My third Mr. Universe Countest, the one that he won a year before. I won that one. Then I took him to the Mr. Universe Countest in London, to the other federation. And he entered in that one, the amateur, and he won that one. So we both now won one. So there was not like trying to take something from him or him from me. And then the year after that, I came back and then I beat Sergio Oliver. And I won the Mr. Olympia. From then on, there was, no one could beat me anymore. So that was it. So that's, so we all worked it out. Now, we did compete again against each other because eventually we ran into each other in the Mr. Olympia.

• 1:38:21Speaker 01

  Because he was winning Mr. Olympia three times. And the fourth time when he tried was 1980. I came back and competed again after five years of retirement. And so that's where we ran into each other again. And I could not tell anyone that I'm competing because I was listed as a judge at that Mr. Olympia competition. And so only the day when we had the judges meeting, I said, you know something, guys? I'm not gonna judge tomorrow. I'm going to compete tomorrow. And they said, what? You know, so it was kind of a big surprise. So at that point, no other bodybuilder would pull out. So they just then competed against me and I was lucky enough to win.

• 1:39:05Jocko Willink?

  Now, from a training perspective, you always hear that, like, that level of definition and that level of shred is more based usually on diet than on your working out. What did you change? Was it, was it the working out change? Or did you actually shift your diet somewhat?

• 1:39:27Speaker 01

  Uh, I think there were a few basic things like milk products that Frank Zane and Franco both were very adamant about for me to cut out. And for me, cutting out the milk products alone helped me a lot to get more defined. The other thing was to have desserts. I had no concept really at that time about desserts and all that stuff. And I just would eat desserts after every meal. And they said, "Carrot dessert three months before." And that's what we did. Even though the night before the Olympia, or before the Mr. Universe, Frank and I would go to the House of Pies here on Fifth Street,

• 1:40:11Speaker 01

  across the street from Sukkies in Santa Monica. And we would eat a whole cherry pie. But it was like, because we were so starved of carbohydrates, that somehow we blew it. But it didn't hurt anymore, it was too late. Because the next day, we went to New York for the Mr. Olympia contest, and we won. And he won his Mr. Universe and Mr. World contest, and I won the Mr. Olympia. And everything was dandy and fine. But I learned a little bit about that. But I was never really a diet expert. I got my definition from overtraining.

• 1:40:51Speaker 01

  So everyone in a bodybuilding world would say that that many sets, thirty-five sets of body part like I did three times a week, that that was definitely overtraining. And to me, I never knew exactly how to do it without the thirty-five sets. And the reason is because I felt kind of like every exercise had a specific purpose. And so, when I was doing chest, and I was doing five sets, let's say, of bench press.

• 1:41:34Speaker 01

  Then I did five sets of barbell incline press. Then I did five sets of dumbbell incline press. Then I did five sets of flies. Then I did five sets of pull-ups with the dumbbell. Then on a nautilus machine, on a pull-up machine. And then I did the cable crosses for the striations. And it went on and on. It was, each exercise was for a specific purpose. It's the same thing with back. Yes, I was doing my chin-ups, wide grip. But I did five sets in the back, five sets in the front.

• 1:42:16Speaker 01

  But then I remember Frank Zane said if you want to get the intercastles and the serratus, you got to do closed crip chin ups. So we did the closed crip chin ups in order to get the serratus. So but then it was bent over rowing. It was the T-bow rowing with the big blades on it, the paddle against the chest, boom, boom, like this. But then it was also the barbell rowing where I could lift it further up in order to reach the chest with the bar and off a block or off a bench, standing on top of a bench or block. And then there was the cable rowing because they go way to the front and way to the back. And so this is how it goes on and on and on, that pull downs. So it was thirty five sets. So I'm gonna go now.

• 1:43:01Speaker 01

  So each one, I was hitting a certain area and that's how I got my definition. Rather than by burning off fat, I was working it off.

• 1:43:10Jocko Willink?

  Just working.

• 1:43:11Speaker 01

  And just, you know, just burning, they said, I burned like three, five thousand, what was it?

• 1:43:19Speaker 01

  Fifty tons of weights every day. And it was like thousands of calories we burned during the workout. And it was just, and then there was abs and this, it's just, you know, it just went on and on and on. But anyway, it was good. So with me, it was mostly overtraining that created the definition.

• 1:43:37Jocko Willink?

  So for all those people out there that have heard the mantra, which is you can't out-train a bad diet. Arnold says, yes, you can. You can out-train a bad diet. You can out-train some cherry pie.

• 1:43:50Speaker 01

  There may be a, there may be a right because it wasn't a bad diet. It just wasn't a good diet. So like I said, I was never severe. There were some guys that would be really strict all year round. And they would be like Chuck Colores and people like that, that had abs throughout the whole year. Pierre Van den Steen, the Belgian bodybuilder who won Mr. Universe, it just was like ripped. I was never ripped like that. So I mean, those guys, they would be really on the diet, but they would be lean. They don't have the size and all that stuff. So, but you know, I mean.

• 1:44:30Speaker 01

  It's like in life, we can only take ideas and suggestions to improve. But you cannot ever copy anyone. It is a big mistake. Because you have to find out how your mind operates. You have to find out how your body operates. I mean, it would be a mistake for me to copy exactly Frank Zane's training. Or Franco Columbus' training. Franco did only ten sets of thighs, because his thighs got big very, very quickly. And I had these long thighs, and I had to do much more. So everyone trained differently. So the idea to tell someone, here's what you do for bench press.

• 1:45:14Speaker 01

  This is what you do for chest, this is what you do for back. These are the ideas to say, this exercise hits the lower lats. This exercise hits the upper lats. This exercise hits the center of the back. When you roll back, this gets the center. So the more you hold it back there, the more you develop the muscles in the back. And this is how I developed the lower back. You know, by doing good morning exercise with the thumbel, the barbell behind your neck and all those stuff. So you can give people this idea, but then what, how many sets? And how many reps to do for each one of them? They have to figure that out, because everybody has weak points. And everyone's weak points are different.

• 1:45:59Speaker 01

  You know, mind was always, it was hard to get the tricep or to get thighs. So for Franco, it was hard to get the longer bicep. He was at the short bicep, the longer bicep. And to get the outer calves. And he couldn't ever straighten out his bow legs and stuff like that. So everyone had their weak points. So you had to kind of get exercises for the inner thigh to make it visually appear not as bow-legged, but more straight. And the way he posed, so... So we have to, every situation is different. And so this is the important thing is, and at the end, it's like you have an idea, you give people an idea of how to train for every single area of the body.

• 1:46:45Speaker 01

  But then you have to let, then you give them suggestions, how many sets, but then they have to figure it out themselves. It's like I was at Vince's gym in the valley. And I said to Vince, "Why are you doing this stupid exercise?"

• 1:47:05Speaker 01

  I was like lying on a bench, and he had a dumbbell here, and he was going out like this.

• 1:47:12Speaker 01

  I said, "What the fuck is that?" And he says, "Try it."

• 1:47:19Speaker 01

  So I tried it.

• 1:47:22Speaker 01

  And he says, "How many sets did I say?" I said, "Five." And he says, "No, no. You gotta try it 20 sets, 20 reps.

• 1:47:34Speaker 01

  Because then you would know tomorrow which part of your tricep hurts."

• 1:47:40Speaker 01

  So I did 20 sets, 20 reps, like an idiot outside. And the next day, this muscle here, the tricep that separates the back from the bicep, was like twitching, going absolutely crazy. So now I knew that is what it is for. I never knew. After all the years and winning Mr. Universe twice and all this stuff, I was training over there, I did not know that. So it just shows to you that we do exercises and exercises and exercises, but we don't know exactly for which part it really works. And your bone structure will tell you that.

• 1:48:24Speaker 01

  So this is why you have to experiment with your own body. You gotta go and do some daisies squats with your toes pointed out.

• 1:48:36Speaker 01

  Very close together, further apart, and do twenty sets of twenty reps, and then you would know the next day where it hurts.

• 1:48:43Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you will.

• 1:48:44Speaker 01

  You know, it's almost kind of like a Leonardo da Vinci, where you dissect and go into the minute details and be kind of a lab technician, and try to figure out your own body, rather than just copying. So this is what I always say to people. I say, "You've got to figure out your own body, and everyone has to do something, make some changes, some little alterations." Yeah, there are basic things that are the same. But I mean, it's like, how many people don't know

• 1:49:18Speaker 01

  that your bicep

• 1:49:23Speaker 01

  gets developed by not only curling, but also turning the wrist? So what I did was, I ended up putting more weight on the inside than on the outside. So that when I curl up like that, it was really hard to get this tumble in here, because this weight was weighing down, and I was kind of like putting it in, and it cramped my bicep. I said, "Son of a bitch, I'm having such a cramp." I had to straighten it out right away and all that stuff. So, most people don't know that. So this is the little subtle things that you have to give people.

• 1:50:06Speaker 01

  And the same is also with what motivates you to function well and to be happy and to be successful and to be fulfilled and all that stuff. You've got to figure that out, what makes you tick. Yes, there's some basic rules. You can read my book here and all that stuff, but it's still not everything. There's still things that you have to figure out for yourself in order to really get good at things and really reach your potential and reach all of your goals. That's just the bottom line.

• 1:50:40Jocko Willink?

  Whether it's bodybuilding, whether it's trying to find out what you're going to do with your life, how you're going to become happy, how you're going to become successful. Sure, there's guidelines you can follow, in this book, in other books, but you're going to have to make adjustments to make it work for you. That's what we have to do.

• 1:50:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. Absolutely, that's a bottom line.

• 1:50:58Jocko Willink?

  Well, thanks for joining us today. Uh, thanks for taking. I know we took up a little extra time, but thank you. Thank you for uh-

• 1:51:04Speaker 01

  This was, this was fun to schmooze with you guys because it was not like an interview. Kind of, I think what makes yous very attractive and fun is that you're almost kind of, you know, I thought we were sitting there for half an hour and now we've been sitting here for what is it? Like an hour and fifty minutes, forty-five minutes. So I totally missed that.

• 1:51:27Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:51:28Speaker 01

  But only because I thought that we had a, we were just sitting at a coffee shop and schmoozing and having a good time and, and, and discussing those things. You know, so there's a difference between that and an interview when they come and says, uh, let me ask you a, a, a very interesting question. It's, when did you decide to write this book? You know, the, the, this is kind of like, the way people come with you, you just have to turn on CNN or Fox. I have those things that that's how they usually word the questions.

• 1:51:59Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:59Speaker 01

  That is, that after twelve minutes, you wonder when it can get out of there.

• 1:52:04Jocko Willink?

  Well, the crazy thing about podcasts, we have, we've done some episodes that I think our longest is five and a half hours long. But you know, we're sitting there talking to someone that was in Iraq or in Afghanistan, that we're going through the details of that. It's, it's exactly what you're talking about. You're basically sitting around sharing war stories and time just goes by really quick. Next thing you know, you look at your watch and it's been-

• 1:52:25Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:52:26Jocko Willink?

  -two, three, four hours and, and there you go. But that's a, and what's cool about this, what's cool about podcasts is people listen to them when they're driving, when they're mowing the lawn, when they're working out.

• 1:52:35Speaker 01

  No, no, I, I can totally see that. Yeah.

• 1:52:38Jocko Willink?

  Well, thanks for, thanks for taking the time. Appreciate it.

• 1:52:41Speaker 01

  How much, how much are you guys working out?

• 1:52:43Jocko Willink?

  I work out, so I'll work out in the morning. You know, I would say a good workout for me, if I have my time, I'll do like an hour and a half of, of, of lifting. I usually go for a run after that and then I train jiu-jitsu at night. So, and jiu-jitsu's, what'd you say? Jiu-jitsu's like, you're explosive, but it's also cardio. It's a little bit of both. And that's kind of my, that's kind of my day. What about you?

• 1:53:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, like five, six days a week, one hour, one hour and a half.

• 1:53:10Jocko Willink?

  After this interview, I'm upping it.

• 1:53:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, man.

• 1:53:13Jocko Willink?

  I mean, thirty-five sets. Thirty-five sets per body part. That's the new standard.

• 1:53:17Speaker 01

  Looking at you guys' arms, I don't think you should up this.

• 1:53:23Speaker 01

  Because I mean, it's like a- I don't even know if you can uh carry concealed weapons in California without a permit. I mean, this, this, those guns are big, pretty big. That's all I can tell you.

• 1:53:39Jocko Willink?

  Well, it's interesting, it's interesting, you know, what you were talking about today with the, the explosion of fitness and bodybuilding. I mean, think about your role in that. If you wouldn't have done Conan, if you wouldn't have done pumping iron, like that stuff just wouldn't have happened. And, you know, our, our guns probably wouldn't be where they are today if it wasn't for that.

• 1:54:00Speaker 01

  Right, right. Well, I'm glad that's, that's being useful.

• 1:54:04Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:54:05Speaker 01

  Saying, it's like, uh, uh, the interesting thing about all of this is that when you get into it, it's the last thing you think about is helping anybody.

• 1:54:21Speaker 01

  And then all of a sudden, somehow, you develop into this person that you didn't know. Like, I found out, even when I did not know everything, but just helping somebody else made me feel good.

• 1:54:40Speaker 01

  And I started getting into that, like, training other people, that eventually I took that job in Munich to be the trainer in a bodybuilding gym. And I just found it just so full of joy for myself to work out, to be able to help the 300 members that they had there. And to have them come in one after the next and come to me and says, what would you do for the upper pecs? What would you do for the calves? What would you do for the...? And you just help for hours and hours and hours every day. And then eventually, you know, this whole thing then spreads to... By total coincidence, the Special Olympics, you know, when it became the train of Special Olympics, then it started getting the president's council of physical fitness.

• 1:55:24Speaker 01

  Where all of a sudden, the president sends it around to all the schools and to promote, you know, fitness in the schools and to get more public, to get more kind of physical education classes in the classrooms and all of that. And so then after school programs, so one thing leads to the next. And eventually, you get so high on the idea of helping people that then you run for governor. Right? I mean, and you give up literally like your 20, 25, 30 million dollars for a movie instead of, you know, getting nothing.

• 1:55:55Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:55Speaker 01

  And getting dumped down all day long, like, he did this wrong, he did that wrong. Why did I do that? But I mean, it's, it's just, it's just in your calling. It's just like, he was there.

• 1:56:06Jocko Willink?

  There's, there's, there's a really interesting theme in the book. And I thought you were going to point out, you actually didn't point it out. In the beginning, like the first chapter, you talk about looking in the mirror, looking in your eyes and telling yourself the truth, but you're really focused on you've got to look in the mirror and see who you are. And the last chapter is break the mirrors and don't focus on yourself and it's helping other people out. It's that, that, that, the way that's tied together in the book.

• 1:56:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:56:32Jocko Willink?

  It's, it also kind of, I think, takes a person through their lives. Like you said, when you're, when you're young, you're kind of like focused on what can I do? And then you're looking at yourself, you've got to tell yourself the truth. You've got to figure out what your vision is. But then eventually you get to a point where you've got to smash that mirror and you look to help other people. And that's, that's really what you've done with your life.

• 1:56:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I talked about Sergeant Shriver, right? Um, because when he said that at his commencement speech, I thought it was like so meaningful to me or the guys like me because we deal with the mirror.

• 1:57:09Speaker 01

  And then for all of a sudden to hear smash that mirror that makes you always look at yourself. And you will see the millions of people behind that mirror that need your help. I said, what the fuck? I mean, I gotta go and I have to have this written somewhere. As soon as I hear the speech, I said, I gotta write this down. I said, because this is such a such a like you just said, such an opposite. And that's why we put in the book that first to talk about the mirror, then to talk about smashing the mirror. And what a great way of ending up.

• 1:57:43Jocko Willink?

  Yep, it is indeed. So thanks for joining us. If you're out there listening. Yeah, look in the mirror, tell yourself the truth. And then smash that mirror and see who else you can help out. Thanks, Arnold. Appreciate it.

• 1:57:54Speaker 01

  Thank you. Thank you, guys. Thank you for your service.

• 1:57:57Jocko Willink?

  It was an honor to serve. And with that, well, we actually left the building this time.

• 1:58:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:58:04Jocko Willink?

  Arnold was still in the building. We left the building. We're back down here in San Diego. How'd it go?

• 1:58:11Speaker 02

  It went well. Yeah. So kind of with every moment that passes by, it kind of hits you like, okay, you know, we, you know, we grew up in like essentially the same era where it's like, okay, what was the first one? Pumping iron and Conan. That was the first one. And then Commando.

• 1:58:27Jocko Willink?

  I saw, I saw Conan, the destroyer in the theater.

• 1:58:32Speaker 02

  The destroyer?

• 1:58:33Jocko Willink?

  Yep. Not Conan the Barbarian. I didn't see that in the theater.

• 1:58:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:58:36Jocko Willink?

  Cause that might've come out, what, eighty-three?

• 1:58:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:58:39Jocko Willink?

  So I, I don't think I was old enough for that one. But I saw Conan destroyer in the theater.

• 1:58:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:58:44Jocko Willink?

  Predator was obviously a big one.

• 1:58:46Speaker 02

  I saw Predator in the theater. Yeah.

• 1:58:49Jocko Willink?

  Cause like the guys.

• 1:58:50Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, yeah. The special rescue team, not assassins, by the way.

• 1:58:55Jocko Willink?

  Check.

• 1:58:55Speaker 02

  Really new son of a bitch. But oh, yeah. So with every passing moment, you kind of remember all this stuff like, you know, like we all like how you said, oh, yeah, I watched the Conan the Destroyer in the theater. Like you remember that. So it's like, oh, and here's the guy right here. It's him. He's saying, and he's walking us through all this stuff. So it's like, yeah, it's kind of a trip, I'd say. Um, but yeah.

• 1:59:14Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And, and like, there's so many assets, facets to go down. Like, we didn't talk about Joe Weider. Joe Weider, me as a thirteen-year-old drinking Joe Weider's Superweight Gain Two Thousand.

• 1:59:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:59:27Jocko Willink?

  Right?

• 1:59:27Speaker 02

  No, we didn't.

• 1:59:28Jocko Willink?

  We didn't talk about that. That's a whole thing.

• 1:59:30Speaker 02

  That is a whole thing.

• 1:59:30Jocko Willink?

  That's a whole thing. That's what was happening.

• 1:59:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's interesting that so I, you know, I have some friends, they text me or whatever and they all say the same thing, which is the same for me where it's essentially like the number one reason that most of us wanted to be big and strong and started like lifting weights when we're teenagers and stuff is because of Arnold, because of like all the movies and pretty much all of them, even like Twins, you ever watched Twins?

• 1:59:54Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:55Speaker 02

  Right. You're kind of like, yeah, it's a funny movie and everything, but bro, I kind of want to lift and be big like that, you know? Like, kind of no matter what the movie is, you want to be like that, you know? So, yeah, that was real.

• 2:00:05Jocko Willink?

  Interestingly, in the book, he made the most money off of Twins of all of his movies.

• 2:00:11Speaker 02

  Really?

• 2:00:12Jocko Willink?

  Yep, because whatever, somebody didn't believe in it, which is a big theme for him. People, people say, oh, you're not gonna be able to do this, your accent's too thick, you're too big, whatever they say to him.

• 2:00:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:00:21Jocko Willink?

  You know, you're gonna run for governor, are you kidding me? It's only, it's gonna be in two weeks. He just goes and does it. Well, with Twins, and this is all in the book, it, they're, they saying, hey, you're an action star, you can't do comedy. And so no one wanted to do the film. So he basically did a deal where he made the money off the backend and the film ended up doing awesome.

• 2:00:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:00:41Jocko Willink?

  So that's where, that's the movie he's made the most money from, is that movie, which is pretty crazy, right?

• 2:00:47Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. You'd think, you'd think Terminator, because that's the one that everybody quotes and replicates and all the, you know, all the, all the spin, you know, the sequel and all that kind of stuff. Huh, that's crazy. I watched Twins in the theater.

• 2:01:02Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 2:01:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:01:03Jocko Willink?

  Were you pumped when you watched it?

• 2:01:04Speaker 02

  Yeah. Hell, yeah.

• 2:01:06Jocko Willink?

  Check. Uh, yeah, he's got other stuff going on. Hey, if you haven't watched that, we talked about it a little bit today, but that Netflix special, Arnold, which I watched really good. Um, yeah, he's got an app, he's got like a workout app, it's called The Pump.

• 2:01:22Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:01:22Jocko Willink?

  I got it. I just, I've been checking it out.

• 2:01:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:01:25Jocko Willink?

  It's pretty cool.

• 2:01:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:01:26Jocko Willink?

  Some good workouts in there, lots of sets, lots of reps. Were you surprised by thirty-five sets?

• 2:01:31Speaker 02

  I was not thirty.

• 2:01:32Jocko Willink?

  For a body part.

• 2:01:32Speaker 02

  I, I didn't know the number, but I knew that

• 2:01:35Jocko Willink?

  It was a lot.

• 2:01:35Speaker 02

  They did a lot, yeah, yeah. Cause, so when I was young, I had, we had pumping iron, that came out the year I was born, by the way, pumping iron, but we had it on a video. Tape. So it was Pumping Iron, uh, Star Wars, and then Conan the Barbarian.

• 2:01:46Jocko Willink?

  All in one tape.

• 2:01:47Speaker 02

  All on one tape. You know that.

• 2:01:48Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:01:49Speaker 02

  Super long player. I don't know. It's like the condensed for, um, like quality.

• 2:01:53Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, quality was low.

• 2:01:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:01:55Jocko Willink?

  But we got nine movies on one cassette.

• 2:01:57Speaker 02

  It was good quality to look at, but you know, the data rate or whatever the equivalent would be nowadays, but, um, but yeah, so. Bro, I knew about that kind of stuff. I knew about like Lou Ferrigno, like about lifting and all that stuff or whatever. And you know, you watch it later as an adult and. You kind of mask it onto your workup program and you're like, okay, all right, these are, you know, but they're pros. So I, I dig it.

• 2:02:17Jocko Willink?

  That's what we're doing. Uh, so awesome to sit down, talk with him. Um, just very cool. And, and yeah, his, uh, office there is like, what, what do you, what did you have as you walked in, right? It was a life sized Freeze from Batman, that guy.

• 2:02:36Speaker 02

  Yep, Mr. Freeze.

• 2:02:37Jocko Willink?

  Mr. Freeze. Then it was, uh, the Predator, life sized Predator monster.

• 2:02:45Speaker 02

  Which is bigger than you'd think. So here, and I, I don't want to go too deep down the rabbit hole, but I'm talking to. So I was, um, so I was talking to the guys there as well, and I didn't even actually realize this, but Brian know a lot about all that stuff. So Predator, um, was played by a guy who's like seven feet tall.

• 2:03:05Jocko Willink?

  No kidding.

• 2:03:06Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, you know, the Predator is huge in the movie, but you think it's a movie. So of course they make him look huge and tall or whatever. But the real guy who played it is the same guy who played in Harry and the Hendersons. You know, Harry and the Hendersons, the Bigfoot movie, the guy who played Bigfoot, seven feet tall, he played the Predator. So when you see the Predator, the full sized Predator and he's seven feet tall, which he is, you're like, okay.

• 2:03:24Jocko Willink?

  Is he a jacked guy? The guy that played it?

• 2:03:26Speaker 02

  No, like kind of tall, skinny, black guy.

• 2:03:28Jocko Willink?

  Played, who played, uh, Chewbacca? A different guy or the same guy?

• 2:03:33Speaker 02

  No, no, different guy. Um, yeah, he was more of, actually the guy who played Predator was a tall, black guy and Chewbacca was a white guy. But yeah, I forget their names, so.

• 2:03:43Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 2:03:44Speaker 02

  But nonetheless.

• 2:03:44Jocko Willink?

  We remember the characters.

• 2:03:46Speaker 02

  The, the, yeah, so the Predator, which originally was supposed to be played by Van Damme, by the way, who is not seven feet tall.

• 2:03:52Jocko Willink?

  Jean-Claude Van.

• 2:03:52Speaker 02

  Jean-Claude Van Damme was supposed to be the Predator.

• 2:03:54Jocko Willink?

  How come he didn't stick with the role?

• 2:03:56Speaker 02

  Because during that time, the, the Predator was gonna be nothing but special effects. It was, so he wore a red suit, right? So the, you know, the blue background and the red suit. So he'd be running around in this red suit. They, you know, they'd do CGI, you know, the, or I guess it wasn't CGI back then, but you know, maybe it was. But nonetheless, it'd be a special effect. It wouldn't be him, you know, it'd be a special effect. So after, after a while, he was running around, it didn't look good either, by the way. So it was kind of a decision where Jean-Claude didn't like it. And then kind of the director and stuff was like, ah, this isn't gonna work. And Jean-Claude was like, what? I'm not gonna be shown in all this stuff or whatever you find out later, I guess. So they were like, ah, we're gonna do something else. And they pivoted and got the iconic.

• 2:04:35Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I think it would have been weird to have the alien dude doing like karate type stuff.

• 2:04:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, he wasn't doing karate.

• 2:04:43Jocko Willink?

  Are you sure about that? Cause why would you bring in Van Damme if he wasn't be doing some splits and whatnot?

• 2:04:47Speaker 02

  Well, keep in mind, this was nineteen eighty.

• 2:04:49Jocko Willink?

  Would you be impressed if Predator was doing splits?

• 2:04:51Speaker 02

  Well, he was running and jumping around.

• 2:04:52Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:53Speaker 02

  So it's like athletic stuff, but yeah, I mean, maybe he was doing that, but, but that was before Van Damme became Van Damme though.

• 2:05:00Jocko Willink?

  Oh, okay.

• 2:05:00Speaker 02

  So he was, so yeah, that's how it went down. But obviously, you know, Predator is like the Predator alien. What do they call it? The, the real name is like Aucha, Yaucha or something like that. Anyway, yeah, you wanna know this kind of stuff, but.

• 2:05:13Jocko Willink?

  You're going too deep for me.

• 2:05:14Speaker 02

  I understand. But that look is like part of the iconic nature of the whole Predator. You know, if it's, it's almost like you can't imagine something else besides that one, you know?

• 2:05:26Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:26Speaker 02

  That's what it feels like.

• 2:05:27Jocko Willink?

  Check. And then there was the life-size Terminator and the life-size Terminator, like both Arnold Terminator and then just the straight metal Terminator.

• 2:05:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, that was, that's.

• 2:05:37Jocko Willink?

  That was cool to see. Well, that was awesome. Cool to sit down. Definitely cool to talk about working out. Talk about fuel. We're working out. So, so have you, are you going to modify any of your workouts? I am definitely upping my sets. Now, I did think about this. I was like 35 sets, but when I do pull ups, I do, sometimes I'll do 20 sets just of pull ups. Sometimes even 25 to 30 sets of just pull ups. Just pull ups, just wide grip pull ups. So now if I start rotating in, maybe some closer grip, maybe some bent over row, like some other stuff. I think it's, that's my next move. That's what I'm doing.

• 2:06:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, that feels like that was the idea behind the approach because remember what he was saying? He was like, yeah, I'm going to do five sets of rows, five sets of, you know, freaking T bar. And he's like, and after a while, 35 sets, because you do seven exercises. So it was more, it seemed like anyway, it was more about the hitting the muscle in all these different angles, you know?

• 2:06:32Jocko Willink?

  He was getting fired up, wasn't he? He was getting fired up talking about working out.

• 2:06:35Speaker 02

  And if you notice, if you notice, it, it's, it almost sorted itself out that I got the impression anyway, that the working out and the bodybuilding part of things was kind of the core of everything, you know?

• 2:06:48Jocko Willink?

  He said that. And it's in the book. He said that. Hey, I learned this lesson. I gotta work hard. I learned this lesson. I gotta try different things. I learned this lesson. Everyone's a little bit different.

• 2:06:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:06:57Jocko Willink?

  Even, and we didn't get too much into it, but like on the political side, when he was the governor, he was reaching out and trying to figure out compromises on how to actually make things happen instead of just having a big stalemate. So he brought people into his cabinet or, you know, into his administration, into his administration that were left leaning, right? And people were like, oh, what are you doing? He's like, oh, I'm trying to figure out how to make this work. Basically. So it was, and that's all in that there's one, one of his rules was shut your mouth and listen. Like, that's basically what he did was, okay, I know what my opinion is. What's their opinion? Let's figure out how to make these things work. So awesome. That's what we're doing. We're working out.

• 2:07:39Jocko Willink?

  We're figuring out how to make things work. Going to need some fuel. I'm drinking some milk right now. You're drinking some go. So if you want some good fuel for your body, for your system, for your Terminator soul, jockofuel.com, go and get some protein, go get some go, go and get some greens, which the cool thing about greens is look. Bring in the whole vegetable scenario in is just a it's a lot. You know what I mean? Are you fired up to eat vegetables like excited about it? Under very few circumstances am I fired up to eat vegetables. If there's a circumstance where you're fired up to eat vegetables, cool. Yeah. Take advantage of it. I'm down to eat vegetables, but Cool.

• 2:08:23Jocko Willink?

  Given your question, you're correct. Yeah, like so sometimes it's more of a chore. Sometimes, yes. But you still need them. Yeah. Greens. Get the greens and believe it or not, we made the greens taste good, naturally sweetened, good to go. Jocko Fuel dot com, Joint Warfare, Super Krill, Time War. Take this stuff, it's going to help you across the board. I was talking to someone the other day and I was like, dude, you need to take time more. You need to take it. It's going to make you feel so much better because it helps every aspect. So that's what we're doing. Jocko Fuel dot com. You can also get this stuff at Wawa Vitamin Shop, GNC Military Commissaries, Afees, Hanaford, Dash Stores in Maryland, Wakeford, ShopRite, HEB down in Texas.

• 2:09:07Jocko Willink?

  They might, you know, HEB might start having a new section just called Jocko Fuel. Yeah. Thanks to you all down there in Texas and Meyer, same thing. They might have a, oh, just go to the Jocko Fuel section. Cause that's what we're doing. Harris Teeter, Lifetime Fitness, Shields, and then small gyms everywhere, whether you got a jiu jitsu gym, whether you got a CrossFit gym, we're actually in Gold's Gym, speaking of Arnold Schwarzenegger. Oh damn. Gold's Gym, a bunch of Gold's Gym bringing us in there. People want the good stuff. They want the clean stuff. If you want stuff inside your gym and you own a gym, uh, email J F sales at Jocko Fuel dot com, or if you are a member at a gym and you want this stuff, tell your, tell your gym owner to email J F sales at Jocko Fuel dot com. That's what we're doing.

• 2:09:50Jocko Willink?

  Also, OriginUSA.com. If you're going to need clothing.

• 2:09:55Jocko Willink?

  At some juncture, sometimes you need workout clothing. We got you, originusa.com. Sometimes you need jujitsu clothing. We got you, originusa.com. And sometimes you need work clothing. We got you, originusa.com. And sometimes you need going out to dinner with your wife clothing. We got you.

• 2:10:15Speaker 02

  Tier one.

• 2:10:16Jocko Willink?

  So there we go. We, so basically we got you.

• 2:10:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:10:19Jocko Willink?

  24 hours a day, we got you. We got you covered and we got you covered with stuff that's a made 100% in America. So never mind all the slave labor that's happening overseas. Don't worry about that. You're not participating in that. You're not participating in the destruction of the environment, which is what's happening. Cause they, they dye their jeans. They take the excess dye and dump it into the river, goes to the ocean, kills everything. We're not doing that. This is made in America. We have some regulations here to protect the environment.

• 2:10:50Jocko Willink?

  Other people say, oh, we don't want to follow those regulations. We'll make this stuff overseas. And then you know what they say, but we'll give 1% to the, to back to the environment. What's good as that?

• 2:11:02Jocko Willink?

  How does that 1%? Does that pull the poisons that you put in the rivers? Does it pull them out? No, it doesn't.

• 2:11:09Jocko Willink?

  Buy the best, originusa.com. That's what we're doing.

• 2:11:12Speaker 02

  It's true. Also Jocko's store. It's called Jocko's store. Discipline equals freedom. We're representing, you know, we're still on the path. We're always going to be on the path. So yeah, if you want to represent this, where you get your stuff. Hats, hoodies, shirts, of course. Oh, whatever shirt you need on that one. Also have the shirt locker. Um, this is a subscription scenario, different design every month. People seem to like it. Uh, you'll notice the layers as far as layers go. Here also back, uh, to, to just the store, new discipline equals freedom shirt is out. It's a new one, brand new. No one's ever seen it.

• 2:11:45Jocko Willink?

  Tell us the layers will vision.

• 2:11:46Speaker 02

  Actually, there's no layers. It's just, it's just another version of the representation of discipline equals freedom. But actually I, I'm sorry, my mistake. It's not out yet. It will be out soon though. So it's in the process, but if you want to be on the alert for the first wave, the first adish, sign up on the email list on jacostore.com if, if that's what you want.

• 2:12:04Jocko Willink?

  The email list, what do you go to the website?

• 2:12:07Speaker 02

  Go to the website right at the bottom. Yeah, it doesn't really, it doesn't, you know, a lot of, what do you call? E-commerce, right? Store, online stores where they'll have the pop-up or whatever. So yeah, it's not that in your face. It's over and it's kind of on the bottom. You just scroll down. It's actually pretty easy like anything else. But yeah, sign up for that. Get the alert. Boom. You be on the first edition of the discipline equals freedom version four.

• 2:12:27Jocko Willink?

  Did the shirt locker shirt you were telling me about land?

• 2:12:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:12:30Jocko Willink?

  No. In the wild.

• 2:12:31Speaker 02

  March first.

• 2:12:32Jocko Willink?

  March first it lands, but you seem like you're excited about.

• 2:12:34Speaker 02

  We're very excited.

• 2:12:35Jocko Willink?

  Sugar coated lies.

• 2:12:36Speaker 02

  Sugar coated lies, yes.

• 2:12:37Jocko Willink?

  Represented in a new way.

• 2:12:39Speaker 02

  You know, in a, in a good way, we'll say new way. Yeah. I mean, technically they're all new. So cool. But you know, it's, it's, it put this way, it's represented appropriately.

• 2:12:48Jocko Willink?

  Heck, awesome. Also, you're gonna need some steak. You're definitely gonna need some steak. If you're getting jacked, you need steak, you need protein. That's what we're doing. Go to primalbeef.com or go to coloradocraftbeef.com to, to awesome companies that are giving you the goods. The best steak you're gonna get. The best burger you're gonna get. That's what we're doing. So check out primalbeef.com or coloradocraftbeef.com. Also subscribe to the podcast. Also jockounderground.com. We're about to record one of those. Check that out. Also, we got YouTube. We got psychological warfare. We got flip side canvas. I have written a bunch of books about leadership and I've written a bunch of kids books. Check out the kids books, way of the warrior kid. It's a whole series.

• 2:13:33Jocko Willink?

  Check that out. Also, Echelon Front. We have a leadership consultancy. We solve problems through leadership. Go to echelonfront.com. If you need help inside your organization, that's what we do. We have live events and we also work specifically with companies over longer periods of time to get them aligned with their leadership. And then you as an individual human, you might need leadership in your life. Well, let me rephrase that. You need leadership in your life. You need to be a leader, whether you're interacting with your kids, interacting with your spouse, interacting with your friends, interacting at work with your family. Whatever the case may be, you need to know how to lead. Leadership is a skill that you can learn. And for you as an individual, we've got the Extreme Ownership Academy. Go to extremeownership.com

• 2:14:16Jocko Willink?

  and take, there's a couple of free courses on there. Just take those at a minimum. They're just free.

• 2:14:22Jocko Willink?

  Just to understand what we do. And then if you feel like you need some more, get some more. You see something? You like something? Get something. That's the way it used to be, right? I dig it. And if you want to help service members, active and retired, you want to help their their families, Gold Star families, Mark Lee's mom, Mama Lee, she's got an incredible charity organization. If you want to donate or you want to get involved, go to Americas Mighty Warriors.org. Also, HeroesAndHorses.org, taking veterans up into the mountains to let them find themselves. And Jimmy May's organization, BeyondTheBrotherhood.org. If you want to connect with us, Arnold, he's on the interwebs. He's got Schwarzenegger.com.

• 2:15:07Jocko Willink?

  And he's also on Instagram. He's also on Twitter X. I'm calling it Twitter X. Cover the bases. He's there at Schwarzenegger and then Facebook and YouTube. He's at Arnold Schwarzenegger, of course. Also, if you want to connect with Echo and myself, Echo is at Echo Charles. I am at Jocko Willink. Just be careful. Cause infinite scroll will grab you and you'll waste a bunch of time and we don't have any time to waste. So just watch out for that algorithm. And also, we are able to do this, what we get to do, what we do here, because our military personnel are out there around the world,

• 2:15:48Jocko Willink?

  protecting us and protecting our way of life. So thanks to all of you. Also, thanks to our police and law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, border patrol, secret service, and all other first responders. Thank you for what you do every day to keep us safe. We appreciate it. And the last thing I want to do for everybody is just remind you of two things from Arnold's life and from his book, and they're related. And I talked about them a little bit. First thing is look in the mirror. Look in the mirror. See yourself for who you really are.

• 2:16:28Jocko Willink?

  Something I talk about a lot. You've got to tell yourself the truth. So look in the mirror, look at yourself in the eyes and tell yourself the truth. Who are you? Are you doing what you should be doing? Are you working hard enough to become who you know you should become?

• 2:16:46Jocko Willink?

  So that's number one, look in the mirror. Then, number two, smash that mirror. Smash that mirror. Stop focusing on yourself and see what you can give. See who you can help. And what you give, you will get back.

• 2:17:05Jocko Willink?

  It's not about you.

• 2:17:08Jocko Willink?

  So go out there, get after it, and be useful. And until next time, this is Echo and Jocko, out.