Waking Up Early, Living with Purpose & Respecting Yourself - Jocko Willink (4K)

Jocko Willink is a retired United States Navy officer in SEAL Team 3, an author and a podcaster. Finding discipline in the modern world is hard. A hyper convenient existence rarely encourages radical responsibility or extreme ownership. Thankfully Jocko has spent an entire life learning how to love discomfort, and also teaching others how to love it too. If discipline equals freedom then Jocko must be one of the freest men on the planet. Expect to learn what Jocko thinks about the Detroit self-defence guy, why discipline always beats motivation, the similarities between elite special forces and elite BJJ athletes, Jocko's opinion on Jordan Peterson, how to get over an ex, whether he regrets being famous after working in the shadows for so long, how he used a Jim Carrey impression to chat up his wife, whether he wants to try psychedelics and much more... Produced by Colton Haas. Sponsors: Get 30% discount on your at-home testosterone test at https://trylgc.com/modernwisdom (use code: MODERN30) Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and Free Shipping from Athletic Greens at https://athleticgreens.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 10% discount on your first month from BetterHelp at https://betterhelp.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Check out Jocko's website - https://jocko.com/ Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #jockowillink #discipline #motivation - 00:00 Intro 03:20 BJJ Athletes Vs Special Forces Operators 09:55 Is it Possible to Take Too Much Responsibility? 15:33 Jordan Peterson 26:10 Revisiting the ‘Good’ Video 32:29 Do People Overcomplicate Motivation & Courage? 39:40 Learning How to Fight Properly 45:26 Mental Health Treatment in America 51:48 Being a Husband & Father 1:04:15 Processing Grief & Heartbreak 1:11:29 Why Jocko Writes Kids Books 1:31:53 How Surfing Impacted Jocko 1:38:05 Keeping in Mind the Shortness of Life 1:46:51 Life as an ex-Navy SEAL 1:52:25 Problems of Fame & Being Recognised 2:01:45 Would Jocko Run for Office? 2:07:24 No Solutions, Only Trade-Offs 2:11:31 Does Jocko Plan for Long-Term? 2:15:09 What Jocko Sacrifices for Success 2:32:39 Where to Find Jocko - Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ Listen to all episodes on audio: Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  There's going to be things in your life that you don't have control over. Human beings can control a lot more than they think they can. And oftentimes it's pretty easy just to say, oh, that's not me. That's not on me. And people say, that's not my fault. There's nothing I can do about that. And more often than people think, there is something you can do about it. And it is your fault.

• 0:21Chris Williamson?

  Jocka Willink, welcome to the show.

• 0:22Speaker 00

  Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.

• 0:24Chris Williamson?

  You flew to watch the UFC with Cam Haynes and Chris Pratt. I want to know what a night out with Jocka Willink looks like.

• 0:35Speaker 00

  Well, actually, I didn't fly up there with Cam. Cam was already up there. I think he flew in from Oregon where he is, where he lives. But we did, we did meet up there and, but I did fly up there with Chris Pratt and Jack Carr and some of the other folks from The Terminal List, which is a TV show that Chris Pratt is in, that Jack Carr wrote the book that the show is based on. And we went up there, watched the fights. It was, it was a very cool night. Yeah, it was fun.

• 1:05Chris Williamson?

  What time did you get up the next day?

• 1:07Speaker 00

  I got up, I don't know, but Cam was giving me a hard time. He says, what, you know, what are you, are you going to get up tomorrow morning? And I said, I'm not even going to get home until three in the morning. And that's where I, that's when I got home. I got home at three o'clock in the morning. I think I got up around maybe eight, eight 30, something like that.

• 1:23Chris Williamson?

  The fact that you don't do the 4:30 AM thing after a night out makes me feel at least a little bit more mortal.

• 1:28Speaker 00

  If it's going to be less than four hours of sleep, then I'll make some kind of adjustment.

• 1:33Chris Williamson?

  You'll just push it the next day?

• 1:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:35Chris Williamson?

  What was it like to see the UFC live? Have you seen that before?

• 1:37Speaker 00

  I've been to so many UFC's. I don't, I don't know how many UFC's I've been to, but I've been to a lot. I spent, I, when I was younger, I spent a lot of time coaching and training fighters. So I corner, I've cornered a bunch of fighters in the UFC. And so I've been to, I don't even know how many UFC's I've been to. But I haven't been in a long time. I haven't been in probably three, four years. So it was cool to go and see one again and, and get back up there. UFC.

• 2:03Speaker 00

  Seeing the UFC live is awesome. And look, you know, people will say, and even I'll say this too. It's great to sit at home and, you know, get all the different angles and hear the commentary. That's cool. There's a benefit to that. But there is a lot of hype and a lot of energy that's in the room or in the stadium when it's going on. And so being there live definitely, definitely is worth doing occasionally to make sure you don't forget what that's all about.

• 2:35Chris Williamson?

  How do you handle the next day now if you've had a few drinks the night before?

• 2:38Speaker 00

  I actually don't drink. So, you know, there's really no factor for me. You know, I drank more than my fair share when I was in the military. And then when I retired from the military and I kind of just, over time, over time, I just kind of wasn't drinking anymore. Now I just don't really drink anymore. There's not much in it for me. You know, I'm an old man with, I'm married with kids and businesses and all this other stuff going on. So I'm not going to get much out of drinking anymore.

• 3:08Chris Williamson?

  And a big price to pay the next day as well if you did decide to do it maybe?

• 3:12Speaker 00

  I guess, sure, I guess that that might be some of it, but there's just, I just don't, I'm not getting anything out of it.

• 3:20Chris Williamson?

  So two of the biggest elements in your life have been your military training and your martial arts training. What would you say are the commonalities between the best BJJ athletes and the best special forces operators that you've worked with?

• 3:37Speaker 00

  There's probably the biggest commonality between the two is some kind of strange contrast between being extremely disciplined and being extremely creative. So clearly, if you're going to get good at jiu jitsu, you've got to be disciplined enough to train all the time. Same thing with being in the military. If you're going to be a good operator, you have to have the discipline to push yourself in training. But you can't be a person that, you know, leans so hard towards a disciplined, structured life that you don't have any creativity. Because both in jiu jitsu and on the battlefield, you want to, you definitely want to be creative and figure out creative solutions and things that people haven't thought of. And things that the enemy is not going to think of or that your opponent's not going to think of.

• 4:19Speaker 00

  So you've got to find that person who has a good balance between discipline and kind of a wild freedom creativity that they can make adjustments.

• 4:29Chris Williamson?

  It's interesting to think that.

• 4:33Chris Williamson?

  More focus or more efficiency isn't always the solution to everything. So the analogy I'd use is if you think about an artist's creative studio where they need their creativity, it's not orderly. You know, there's half coffees and easels and sketches and paint and all sorts of stuff all over it. What does that engender? What's that environment creating for them? But then when they need to go and file their taxes, trying to file their taxes in that same room is probably not a good idea. And I guess that flip flop between off and on, right? Between focus and play seems like a very interesting thing to think about, especially in a military context.

• 5:16Chris Williamson?

  What does that mean when you're talking about a special forces operator being creative?

• 5:23Speaker 00

  You know, there's a certain level of inside the military in general is if you're gonna, you have to be a person that kind of follows the rules and stays within standards. And that's great. And you're gonna, you're gonna be a good, solid soldier if that's what you are. But if you have a mindset that's, that's so highly disciplined, so highly structured, like I just said, then you're not going to think creatively when there's a problem that needs to be solved. So you want to have people that don't mind the discipline and can actually access the discipline in a way that they can utilize it, but you don't want people to be trapped by discipline. And it's the same thing in jujitsu.

• 6:07Speaker 00

  If you have someone that only knows how to do a certain move and they can't think creatively about other ways to employ that, it's not that they're not going to be good because they are going to be good. But there's gonna, they're gonna reach limitations. And you know, one of the interesting things in the SEAL teams is

• 6:26Speaker 00

  We didn't have, especially when I was coming up, we didn't have any doctrine whatsoever. There was no, there was no written doctrine of any kind. So everything that you learned was word of mouth. You learned from the guys that went before you. And that meant if the guys that went before you weren't, didn't really know what they were doing, you're probably learning a bad way. And if you didn't think, if you didn't think objectively about it, then you might follow someone down a path that doesn't make any sense. So you ended up with a bunch of guys in the SEAL teams that were pretty open minded and they could kind of look at problems and figure out how to solve them. In the Army and the Marine Corps, they have doctrine for just about everything. This is how you do a raid. This is how you conduct an ambush. They had written doctrine for this. So if you didn't know how, you could just look at a book, which is actually a huge benefit for them.

• 7:11Speaker 00

  Because if I'm a new platoon commander and I don't know how, don't know how to do an ambush, I can just look at this book and I can learn how to do it. And so there's some huge benefits to not, to, to having a very disciplined doctrine that you can follow. But that's one of the odd advantages of the SEAL teams is that, since we didn't have any doctrine, we had to be a little bit more free thinking and that made us a little bit more adaptive in, in some situations. So it's just like anything else. Your strength can be your weakness, your weakness can be your strength. And you have to be aware, and if you're aware that it's a strength, and if you're aware that it can also be a weakness, and if you're aware that it's a weakness and you're aware that it can also be a strength, then you can probably optimize the way that you're going to think, which is pretty beneficial.

• 7:55Chris Williamson?

  Do you think that can be trained, that creativity?

• 7:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think creativity can be trained. It, it, just like any other natural trait, some people are going to have more propensity to be creative than someone else. And some people are more rigid than other people in the way they think. And you can take someone that's more rigid and you can make them more creative. But everyone's going to have some kind of a limitation. And some people might have a pretty, pretty, pretty subdued limitation of how creative they're going to get. And some people can really be trained to get a lot better at that.

• 8:29Chris Williamson?

  Where did you fall on that spectrum?

• 8:32Speaker 00

  I would say I fell, I would say I fell pretty hard in both directions. So I was, you know, a disciplined person that believed in structure and I liked structure. And at the same time, you know, I was, I would definitely think of things in a different way. I was a very rebellious kid and I think rebellion could be somehow tied to creativity and looking at things and saying, hey, that doesn't make sense to me. So I'd say that I had, I'd say I was pretty, a pretty strong degree of both of those things. And that's what made me who I am.

• 9:09Chris Williamson?

  Well, especially the music that you listened to as well, growing up, right? I don't think, almost all of the kids that I know that grow up listening to metal or hardcore, they've, you can't listen to that and not have a rebellious streak in you.

• 9:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, you definitely can't listen to that and not have a rebellious streak in you. And that, that's, that, that did kind of drive my way of thinking a lot when I was growing up. And, and not only did it drive my way of thinking, I think I found that kind of music because that's the way I was sort of engineered in the first place. So, yeah.

• 9:41Chris Williamson?

  Who were you listening to when you grew up?

• 9:44Speaker 00

  Bad Brains, Black Flag, Agnostic Front, Crow Mags. Black Sabbath is my favorite band of all time.

• 9:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, those kind of bands.

• 9:55Chris Williamson?

  A lot of your work is, it's focused on encouraging people to take ownership and responsibility for things. One of the things that I've been thinking about a lot recently is whether it's possible to take too much responsibility or too much ownership, where you start to believe that you're at fault or you're accountable for things and blame yourself too frequently, blame yourself too much. You think that's possible?

• 10:23Speaker 00

  There's a way that it can happen, usually from a leadership perspective, when people ask me this question, "Hey, is it possible to take too much ownership?" The answer is yes. And that is, if I'm in charge, and you're working for me, and I take so much ownership over a mission or over a project that you don't feel like you have any input at all, then I've taken too much ownership. As far as, like, as an individual person, there's going to be things in your life that you don't have control over. And, you know, one of the, one of the early questions that I got asked about this, you know, like, for instance, someone gets a terrible disease, and, or their kids gets, gets a terrible disease.

• 11:08Speaker 00

  A, a random disease that's, through no fault of anyone, the kid gets sick, or the person gets sick. And, no, there's nothing you can do about that. What you can take ownership, though, is how you respond to that situation. And so, that's what you have to do. There's things that you can control, there's things you can't control. Now, I will tell you that human beings can control a lot more than they think they can. And oftentimes, it's pretty easy just to say, "Oh, that's not me, that's not on me." And I think that's, that's the whole genesis of the idea of extreme ownership, is most of the time, or much of the time, people say, "That's not my fault, there's nothing I can do about that." And more often than people think, there is something you can do about it. And you can, and it is your fault.

• 11:53Chris Williamson?

  I find it interesting to think about, it's not your fault, but it is your responsibility as well, and, and how that sits in amongst this. My concern with it is, don't get me wrong, I think that right now, the vast majority of people need to take more responsibility. I think that it is a great counter to a victim mindset. I think that it helps people with agency and sovereignty.

• 12:15Chris Williamson?

  I can see elements in my life, though, of times when I've blamed myself for things which I'm in no way even remotely associated with. So for instance, let's say that I'm doing a podcast with someone, or I'm doing a live event, right? And I'm facilitating some discussion. And I ask a question and the guest fluffs the response, like gives a poor response. A lot of the time, the first place that I would go is, that was on me. Somehow I should have asked a better question. And even if I'd asked the absolute perfect question, and you could roll that forward into a relationship, you know, that you're in a relationship with a bad partner, or you, something occurs, I just, I'm trying to find that line of how people can

• 12:58Chris Williamson?

  balance it so that they don't end up putting so much pressure and weight on them that it crushes them.

• 13:05Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, here's two examples of what you're talking about. You, you mentioned one relationship. Another one is just if you're working for me. So if you're working for me, and you don't show up on time, or you're not professional when you're conducting your briefs, I need to say something to you. And I need to take ownership of the fact that I haven't made it clear that, hey, you need to show up on time, and hey, you need to be more professional, and hey, you need to wear the right uniform, or dress the part. I need to take ownership of that. And maybe if I do, and I talk to you, and we discuss why it's important, and you say, oh, yeah, I really didn't think about that. And you change your ways, and you get on board, and you start showing up on time, and you start acting more professional, it's great, we solved the problem. There's also a chance that you're late again, or you show up, you

• 13:47Speaker 00

  know, with booze on your breath, or whatever, and we're meeting with a client, and I say, hey, Chris, you can't do this. This is, look, I'm serious. You cannot act this way. This reflects bad on all of us. And maybe you, and I might even say, listen, if you keep this up, you're not even going to be working here anymore. I'm gonna have to get rid of you. You say, I know, I love working with you. It's gonna be great. I won't do it again. And maybe that solves your problem. Or maybe you're late again, or you continue to act unprofessionally, and then I'm gonna get rid of you. I'm gonna say, hey, Chris, look, I talked to you. I tried to explain this to you. And at a certain point, this job isn't for you. So that can happen. And I have to take ownership of the fact that you are actually not capable of doing this job that I've asked you. So that's fine. Same thing can happen in a relationship, right?

• 14:28Speaker 00

  Look, if you're in a relationship with someone and you're bickering about where we're gonna go for dinner, or you came home late from work, and all you do is, well, I've been working all day. You should respect the fact that I've been working all day. Like, that's actually on you. That's actually on you. And you can make adjustments to that. Now, can you get to a point in a relationship where the other person is not a good fit for you? And at some point, you say, you know what? I've made these adjustments. I've come home, you know, on time. I've texted you when I was gonna be late. And these other things are coming up, and you say, you know what? I don't think this is working. And I don't think this is a good relationship. So at a certain point, you say, okay, I've made the adjustments that I can make, and I have to take ownership of the fact that we're not a good match.

• 15:13Speaker 00

  So, yeah, there's plenty of times where taking ownership means actually solving the problem, not continuing to pour the problem down your neck every night, because that's not very helpful to anybody. So, yes, at a certain point, you have to make adjustments, and you have to move forward.

• 15:32Chris Williamson?

  There's a lot of similarities, I think, between your personal philosophy and Jordan Peterson's. I know you've spoken to him a couple of times. What have you learned from him?

• 15:41Speaker 00

  Well, the most interesting thing that I learned from Jordan Peterson, and I mentioned this the first time he came on my podcast, was that, you know, he's a trained academic that studied this stuff his whole life, and we came to a lot of the same conclusions about things. And I just came to those conclusions through living and the experiences that I had, and he came to them through studying this stuff in a very rigorous way. And the cool thing is, luckily for me, I had written books that sort of predated.

• 16:15Chris Williamson?

  I got there first.

• 16:16Speaker 00

  Yeah. It wasn't that I got there first, but, I mean, these were the thoughts that I had. I mean, Discipline Equals Freedom. That book came out, I think, before I... Before Jordan Peterson was on the scene. It's the book Extreme Ownership, which is about taking personal responsibility. Well, it's about taking responsibility and you can definitely apply it to personal responsibility. So luckily for me, those, those books kind of predated, uh, Jordan Peterson. Coming on to the scene and, and doing everything that he did, but again, it's not like I created any of those things. It's not like I created it before he created it and it's not like he created it before. Other philosophers had figured these things out. So I'd say the, the most interesting thing about Jordan Peterson that I, that I found, and I think it was pretty interesting to him too.

• 16:58Speaker 00

  It was the fact that we both had kind of come to these same conclusions and we had lived very different lives. I mean, I'm sure there's more disparate lives that we could live, but they're, they're pretty different lives. And that's, that was a very interesting thing and it made me feel like. Well, it made me feel good about the fact that the things that I had figured out. Were in line with things that he had figured out and that means maybe there's a little bit more strength in universality to these things that I believed, which. Which felt pretty good.

• 17:29Chris Williamson?

  Just gonna pause that. Do you want to go and see if there's someone stealing things outside?

• 17:35Speaker 00

  If there's someone stealing things, can you let me know?

• 17:41Chris Williamson?

  It looks like they're bringing things in. That's the opposite.

• 17:46Chris Williamson?

  It's nice to know or to think that something that's been proven in the field of battle or on the field of play is backed up in academia. Right? That someone can go through the annals of philosophy, history and come to a similar conclusion as you.

• 17:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely. And you know, the stuff, the stuff that I say is in the Bible, the stuff that I say is in Stoicism and, and.

• 18:09Speaker 00

  Jordan Peterson's, you know, says the stuff that I say, or I say the stuff that he says again, I'm not. Trying to compete with Jordan Peterson on any level, uh, especially some kind of an intellectual level, but. We have similar thoughts about things and that predated either one of us knowing who each other were. So I think that's pretty cool.

• 18:31Chris Williamson?

  Why do you think people are drawn to advice that's telling them to do hard things? Kind of seems counterintuitive.

• 18:41Speaker 00

  Why do I think people are drawn to advice telling them to do hard things? Because I think any person, any human realizes that if you want some kind of a good outcome, you're gonna have to work hard for it. And if you don't work hard for something, you're not gonna get an outcome that's really worth much.

• 19:03Chris Williamson?

  Well, that is the thing that separates the achievements on the other side of it, right? If it was easy, everyone would do it. If it was easy, everyone would achieve it. So this is one of the things that I try and rely on when training's been getting hard. I ruptured my Achilles a couple of years ago. That sucked. I wouldn't advise it as an injury, generally.

• 19:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, and it's like a random, a lot of times people just do it, you know, getting out of their car or something.

• 19:29Chris Williamson?

  Dude, I was playing cricket, the most British way to snap an Achilles.

• 19:32Speaker 00

  That's a very British way to snap your Achilles, for sure.

• 19:38Chris Williamson?

  During that, during the rehab for that, it's pretty just uncomfortable. It's endless calf raises, right? Which, not fun. And the discomfort that you feel and the fear of it re-rupturing, which is the number one thing you don't want to have happen, the thing that I went back to in my mind was, this is why I'm here. The discomfort that I was feeling, the effort, the pain, the sweat, thankfully, this was during COVID, so it meant that if I had to do a workout every single morning for half an hour on just my carbs, it's like, what else are you doing, right? There's a pandemic going on. This is why you're here, was the reminder. It's like, look, this is the reason why the re-rupture rate is 5 to 10%, because people don't want to do this thing. People don't want to do the thing because it hurts, because

• 20:23Chris Williamson?

  it takes half an hour every single day for nearly 12 months. It's a full 12-month recovery. That's why. This is why you're here. And I think that you're right. I think that the selection is, people deep down know that picking up heavy things physically, psychologically, existentially, culturally, is good for us. And I think that that's why it's attractive.

• 20:47Speaker 00

  I agree.

• 20:50Chris Williamson?

  Another thing that I think is that it's one of the reasons why people can become a little bit triggered, triggered, they can become a little bit uncomfortable when they see somebody else that's got a lot of discipline, because I think deep down, they know that if they had that thing, that that would fix a lot of the problems that they have in their life. Is this, is this a dynamic that you, that you've seen?

• 21:09Speaker 00

  I'm sure that's a bummer for someone to look at someone else that's working really hard and, and achieving some positive things and they know that they're not maybe working as hard as they could be and they're not really achieving what they want to achieve. I'm sure that stings a little bit.

• 21:28Chris Williamson?

  Another thing that Jordan said recently is that the problem with Twitter is that the price of being a prick has fallen to zero. I feel like you'd agree with that as well.

• 21:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, I guess I'd agree with that. If you're gonna spend a bunch of time on Twitter, you're gonna, you're gonna run into a bunch of people that don't like you and they're gonna say it and there's nothing you can do about it, so.

• 21:51Chris Williamson?

  And the ability for people's words and the consequences of those words to become detached as well is something that's only pretty recent. I mean, I guess you could have sent a mean telegram a hundred years ago.

• 22:04Speaker 00

  Yeah. I, I would recommend that you don't let random bots or people on Twitter bother you that much. That's, that's my recommendation. I, I would recommend you, you know, the first time I kind of experienced that, it was when I was on, I was on Rogan for the first time and the YouTube video came out and I sat there with my oldest daughter, who is probably maybe 14 or 15 at the time. And I sat there and read these heinous comments about me and laughed. I mean, it was kind of, you know, some were pretty good. It was kind of funny.

• 22:46Speaker 00

  So, yeah, I'm not, I, I'm not getting bothered by somebody that wants to talk smack about me for whatever on Twitter. And also, there's, there's probably some truth to whatever they're saying, you know? They say I'm a big knuckle dragger. Yeah, probably right. You know? They say I'm an idiot. Yeah, there's definitely some of that. What else?

• 23:09Chris Williamson?

  Do you swear much? I don't think I've ever heard you swear.

• 23:12Speaker 00

  I don't swear a ton. And look, there's a term we have in America, I don't know if you have this in in England, but swear like a sailor, meaning people in the Navy swear a lot.

• 23:23Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 23:24Speaker 00

  And certainly when I was in the SEAL teams, I probably swore every seventh, fifth to seventh word that came out of my mouth, especially talking to a SEAL platoon about something. But no, I don't swear a ton. I mean, if you listen to my podcast all the time, you'll see that when there's an appropriate time to swear, then I will. But even, it's interesting, you know, if you swear all the time, it kind of loses its impact. And so when I do swear on the podcast, people usually say, oh, this is an important thing.

• 23:56Chris Williamson?

  Business.

• 23:57Speaker 00

  This is a, this is obviously very, very powerful emotion that he's feeling right, because he just said a swear word. So, yeah, but I don't swear a ton when I'm, and even when I was in the SEAL teams, I'd come home at night and wouldn't swear. I don't swear in front of my wife and I wouldn't swear in front of my kids. So I would just turn it off and that's that.

• 24:18Chris Williamson?

  It's like when you hear Sam Harris swear, if you ever hear him do it, sprinkled very infrequently, but when it happens, you.

• 24:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's an attention getter.

• 24:27Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. I have a friend, Daniel Sloss, comedian and Scottish. So that combined is like a multiplying force. And I actually think that he probably uses more swear words than actual words. They're just, that Salt Bay guy, it's kind of like that, but just throughout every single sentence. Deprogramming it, I think, is important. It's something that I've really tried to work on. You know, just being a working class lad from the UK is, it's part and parcel of the language, perhaps, is being in the SEALs. Listening back and especially hearing yourself speak a lot, which you've done over the last six, seven years or whatever. I don't know, there's something about it that I just, I would rather save it for the times when I need it.

• 25:08Speaker 00

  Yeah. And there is, if you're doing something like where people are going to listen to it.

• 25:17Speaker 00

  Sort of detached from the moment that you're living in, then it's different as well. So it doesn't have this, it doesn't come across the same. And you and I having a conversation over lunch, talking about whatever, that that's different. And you know, those, those words are a little bit more fitting in those situations, but.

• 25:36Chris Williamson?

  Or if you're watching the UFC.

• 25:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, if you're watching the UFC, but yeah. Yeah, I, I, I, look, I don't really, if people swear, it's not, it's not like a huge concern of mine. I don't really care that much, but maybe you could improve your vocabulary a little bit and use.

• 25:54Chris Williamson?

  To not always rely on the same five swear words.

• 25:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, but some people use them well and they're hilarious when they use them.

• 26:00Chris Williamson?

  Daniel, Daniel uses his spectacularly. Yeah, I would say he's probably got a black belt in, in swearing.

• 26:06Speaker 00

  Right on.

• 26:08Chris Williamson?

  I want to revisit your good video. For the people that haven't seen it, it's a two minute long edit. That was released seven years ago on your YouTube channel and it's got like nearly 10 million plays or something now. And in it, you're encouraging people to respond to setbacks and things that don't go well. By saying good, by leaning into the discomfort, by seeing it as an opportunity. Was there anything you think that people misinterpreted about that video? Or about good generally as a concept?

• 26:46Speaker 00

  Look, if you take any idea and you take it to an extreme, then that idea is going to become bad. I mean, even the idea of extreme ownership, if you take it to an extreme where you're like, as you pointed out earlier, you're blaming yourself because your daughter got a, a, a disease. Or you're blaming yourself because your husband is abusing you. Like there, there's a point where you think anything go too far. And well, you know, I mean, there's, there's some pretty good memes about that on the internet. Yeah, there's some good memes about that on the internet. Oh, crashed my car, my dog died. Good. I needed a new car anyways. So yeah, take it to an extreme. It can be, it can become pretty silly or funny, depending on how you take it.

• 27:30Speaker 00

  But for the most part, you're going to run into challenges in life. And if you curl up into a ball and complain about it. That's not going to help you. And if you say, okay, cool. Good. Here's some adjustments I can make to move forward. That's going to be a better move than than cowering.

• 27:49Chris Williamson?

  Is there anything that you wish that you'd added in?

• 27:55Speaker 00

  I don't know. I mean, I said it during one of my podcasts and my friend Echo turned it into a video. So, so that's it. If I wanted to, I probably would have expanded on it or done something else.

• 28:08Speaker 00

  I don't know. Do you tell me? Did I miss something?

• 28:10Chris Williamson?

  I don't think so. I mean, it's pithy and obviously one of, as you've said there,

• 28:16Chris Williamson?

  it's extensive, not exhaustive as a solution. And this is, this is Twitter in a nutshell, that you have to sacrifice how explicit you're being for brevity, right? For being sufficiently succinct that people can understand it and you can get it in in a one minute 55 so that people can actually watch it and one click off or whatever. And people will then use the lack of detail to expand that out and say, yeah, dog died in the car crash and good, right? You can see how that's easy to criticize. But I think overall, there's this really great story, actually. It was about Zeno of City, the guy that founded Stoicism.

• 28:57Chris Williamson?

  And often he was criticized that he was very abrupt when he would speak to people, when he was giving his, because he was around in a time of the sophists, right? And sophistry was all about these big, long, extravagant philosophical treatises. And they would use these super, super long words and stuff. And what he found was that people didn't like the fact of how abrupt he was. Didn't like that. And someone once criticized him for it and he said, yes, I am. Thank you. If I could, I would even shorten the syllables as well. And I like the idea of someone that uses brevity in an effective way.

• 29:36Chris Williamson?

  And this sort of links in with something that I've been thinking about recently, which is to do with the outcomes that we get in life. So.

• 29:48Chris Williamson?

  All of the concerns that we have, all of the sleepless nights and the neuroses and the overthinking and the confusion and the uncertainty and the self doubt and all of that stuff, all combined together, I think probably net us about maybe five or 10% better outcomes in life. It's my belief that most of the qualities that you have, your integrity, your virtue, your discipline, your hard work, your growth mindedness, your humour, your resilience, all of that are forces that are very, very difficult for you to slow down and that once they've got started, it's incredibly hard for you to stop them. And what you're doing with all of the extra concern that comes over the top of that is just making your day to day experience of it a lot more miserable.

• 30:30Chris Williamson?

  And I've been thinking a lot about how can you, how can you, I'm all fatty, right? The love of fate, the love of the destiny that I have is the one that's going to come. I understand that I have control over it. I understand that I have agency, that I have sovereignty, that I can impact my destiny. But also that all of the work and the effort that I put in previously is going to carry me through. And if I've been successful so far, that worrying about success going forward, whether or not it's going to occur, just it doesn't seem super smart. And then relating that to good is that not only do you need to, or can you accept something and say that it is good, you can also have the sense of resiliency that you know that

• 31:15Chris Williamson?

  you've got through something that's worse than this before. How did you get on last time? Did you face something that was difficult? But you're still here. By virtue of the fact that you're listening to this, you're still here. And there's a part of that that makes me, makes me think about, good is an active philosophy, right? It's actively saying, something happens, I'm going to lean into it. I'm going to be a forward motion, right? And then the backup that you seem to have behind that as well is, look at all of the things I've dealt with before. Look at all of the effectiveness that I've come through with previously. I think that those two combined together are pretty powerful.

• 31:57Speaker 00

  I agree.

• 32:00Chris Williamson?

  Speaking about, speaking about motivation and stuff as well, which is obviously kind of the other side of what you do.

• 32:07Speaker 00

  You know why I'm laughing, right?

• 32:08Chris Williamson?

  Why?

• 32:09Speaker 00

  Because you were telling the story about this guy who gave really brief answers, and then you talked for six minutes, and I said, I agree. So I was just having fun.

• 32:19Chris Williamson?

  Good man.

• 32:23Chris Williamson?

  You and Zeno have got a lot in common.

• 32:25Speaker 00

  Maybe.

• 32:27Chris Williamson?

  Do you think that people overcomplicate motivation?

• 32:30Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 32:35Chris Williamson?

  I find that discussions about motivation, a lot of the time, I mean, you are the soundtrack to a lot of motivation compilation videos.

• 32:47Speaker 00

  That's right, yeah.

• 32:49Chris Williamson?

  Motivation universe, 40 minute, get up and get after it, Jocko video.

• 32:56Chris Williamson?

  And so I, I think that a lot of the discussions about motivation can cause people to believe that there's some magical state that they need to be in before they do something.

• 33:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, and as I've said since day one, it's motivation is a feeling that comes and goes, and it doesn't matter whether it's there or not, discipline is infinitely more important. So no matter how you feel, get up and do what you're supposed to do. That's it. And that's discipline. It's not motivation. If you only did what you were supposed to do when you were motivated to do it, that's leaving it to chance. But if you're disciplined, you go do what you're supposed to do. That's the way it works.

• 33:34Chris Williamson?

  I went and listened to an episode you did with Sam Harris, seven years ago now, a long time ago.

• 33:41Chris Williamson?

  He came up with this really interesting idea where he said that you can't fake courage.

• 33:46Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 33:49Chris Williamson?

  That's one of the most interesting ways to look at it. He said that courage or bravery, I think, is actually what he was talking about. It's an emotion that you can't fake. If you fake bravery when you're terrified, that is bravery. And I kind of feel like motivation is the same thing. If you do the thing when you're feeling unmotivated, that is motivation.

• 34:10Speaker 00

  That's it.

• 34:11Chris Williamson?

  So you're saying that all of the Jocko videos of motivation, they can just go off of YouTube?

• 34:15Speaker 00

  Well, I say in a lot of those videos, and sometimes that's what it takes for people to get motivated, is to realize that that motivation doesn't matter.

• 34:23Chris Williamson?

  They don't need the motivation after all.

• 34:23Speaker 00

  It doesn't matter.

• 34:24Chris Williamson?

  It's a self-defeating video.

• 34:25Speaker 00

  Just shut up and go do what you're supposed to do.

• 34:29Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I mean, the difference between the person that spends all day wondering about whether they should go to the gym or not, and the person that just goes to the gym or not, even if they both go, they net out at zero, apart from the fact that one person has spent the entire day obsessing over it.

• 34:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, and probably wasting some brain power on it.

• 34:47Chris Williamson?

  There's this thing called, I bro-science it, called the anxiety cost. So you know, opportunity cost, right? That you, because of doing one thing, you can't do another thing. Anxiety cost to me is the wasted mental effort that you go through obsessing over something when you could fix it quite easily by just doing it. It's one of the most compelling reasons for doing a morning training workout for me. If you've got to train every day, every morning when you wake up, your daily to-do list resets, right? You get out of bed and then your to-do list of meditate and walk the dog and answer emails and do all that. The sooner that you can front-load that stuff, the rest of the day is just, ah.

• 35:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, discipline equals freedom. That's it. I mean, if you have the discipline to get up and get the things done. Well, I've, I've usually, I often tell a similar story. This is the same thing that you just said, which is, you know, the weekend where you really only had two things to do for the weekend? Whatever it was, you had to write this thing and you had to answer this other thing. And on Friday, you're like, I'll do it tomorrow. And on Saturday, like, I'll do it. And it's basically hanging over your head the whole weekend. Whereas if you'd just done Friday afternoon, the whole weekend would have been a lot better. So just do the thing. I agree with you. Just do, just do the thing, man.

• 36:05Chris Williamson?

  What does courage mean to you? Is that a good definition from Sam, do you think? Doing, doing the thing in spite of the way that you feel?

• 36:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think that's, I think that's solid. I, somebody asked me a question the other day. Does courage have to involve risk? And I thought about it a little bit. I haven't thought, I don't sit around and think about a lot of stuff, which might be obvious, I guess. But yeah, I think if you're gonna, if you're gonna get credit for courage, then there has to be some level of risk, whether it's, you know, capital risk in doing something in a business, or physical risk if you're doing something to run into a fire to save somebody. Yeah. So I think, I think courage has to have some kind of risk involved. And then, yes, I agree with Sam Harris when he pointed out that if you're... Acting, if you're doing the thing, then that's courage, no matter how you feel inside your little brain.

• 36:58Chris Williamson?

  Are you sure that you don't spend that much time sat around thinking of stuff? Because I know that you you do a ton of prep for each of your podcast episodes. And as you're reading through a book, I mean, the insights that you pull out of that, that you drag across between, I think you might be doing yourself a bit of a disservice there.

• 37:15Speaker 00

  Well, yes, when I'm reading a book, I'm certainly applying the context of my life and my experiences and what I know and what I think I know to that. So I guess, but that's different than sitting around and thinking.

• 37:29Chris Williamson?

  Oh, you mean like the sort of the chin stroking?

• 37:33Speaker 00

  I don't do a lot of that. Maybe I should do more. I probably need to.

• 37:36Chris Williamson?

  I'd be interested to see that. I could see you sat in a smoking jacket somewhere, cigar.

• 37:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, you know, I think when I run, I think when I'm doing jujitsu, I

• 37:48Chris Williamson?

  Surfing.

• 37:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think when I'm surfing. And those are just, that's, that's a great kind of empty mind. And, and there's times where I'm running and I have to stop and write something down. You know, I'll pull out my, because I'll be listening to some music or something, I'll stop and take a note in, in my iPhone about something that I just thought of.

• 38:09Speaker 00

  So it happens.

• 38:11Chris Williamson?

  Courage is very hard to find when life gets comfortable for people. How can they stop their bravery from eroding when times are easy?

• 38:24Speaker 00

  I guess, I guess what we already talked about. Do something that's hard and do it every day. That's what, that's one of the nice things about jujitsu. You're going to get choked, you're going to be uncomfortable, you're going to get smashed, you're going to have to tap out, your ego is going to get abused. You're, go do that. Go do that. You go for a run, lift, just do hard stuff. And that's a good way to keep that, I guess, fresh.

• 38:52Chris Williamson?

  You think that maps across onto other areas of life as well?

• 38:57Speaker 00

  It certainly seems like it does. But there's no guarantee on any of this stuff, really. There's no guarantee and it depends on what, you know, what kind of courage you're talking about. Are we talking about courage where you're gonna die or you could possibly die? Or you, you know, is that what we're calling courage? Cause there's people that have come from every walk of life that have stepped up in that situation. And there's people that have come from every walk of life and have failed in that situation. So if we're talking life or death. Yeah, I mean, I think you actually have to get to someone that is sort of good with dying and they're okay with it. And then they're gonna have a lot easier time pushing into that fold. If it shows up.

• 39:37Chris Williamson?

  Have you seen those Detroit self-defense videos?

• 39:41Speaker 00

  Uh, yeah, I, I think. Oh, I know I have, I'm trying to think how I saw him, but yeah, cause a lot of jujitsu people will repost those things. Yeah.

• 39:49Chris Williamson?

  What, what do you think that people misunderstand when it comes to life and death? Fights, street fights. What do you think most normal people who haven't been in one? Misbelieve.

• 40:04Speaker 00

  I don't know what that has to do with those Detroit videos. Those Detroit videos are definitely, uh.

• 40:11Chris Williamson?

  It's a pantomime.

• 40:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I, I guess. So I, I guess what? To, to answer your question, what do most people not understand about a street fight? Uh, they're probably not used to just the level of violence that's going to occur. They're not, they're, maybe this is, maybe this is what you're getting at with the Detroit. Self-defense videos or whatever they are. The choreographed maneuvers that you, that work when you and I are going through them and sort of dancing. Those aren't going to work in real life. And so if you think that you're going to be able to drop someone with one punch, you think, all those things that, that, that, that are sort of the old traditional martial arts, doing kata.

• 40:56Speaker 00

  And I, you know, I do this to you and it causes this reaction, then my next move is over here. Yeah, that stuff doesn't really work in a street fight. Just, yeah.

• 41:06Chris Williamson?

  The groin kick and the palm of the hand to the nose to run away from the female, to run away from the attacker and stuff like that.

• 41:14Speaker 00

  Yep, it's not going to work well and it's not very reliable. If you want to learn how to fight, you got to learn how to fight. You know, you got to do jiu-jitsu, Muay Thai, wrestling, boxing. That's what you need to do if you want to learn how to fight.

• 41:31Chris Williamson?

  Have you been to go and see what Tim Kennedy's doing up at his place with his self-defense courses?

• 41:35Speaker 00

  I have not been to one of his courses. It's called Sheepdog Response, but I've seen what he's doing. And of course, you know, Tim's a, not only is he well-versed in martial arts, clearly, he's also well-versed in weapons and he's also well-versed in violence. And so I know what he's teaching is legit stuff.

• 41:58Chris Williamson?

  I'm pretty sure they're using live handheld tasers as well during that to just show people precisely how difficult it is to whatever, do the face palm and the eye gouge and the fish hook and run away. And I think he runs, I think it must be monthly, he does a special one for, not military personnel, for the police. And even them, the amount of training, I think, I mean, we've seen this recently, right? That the training seems to be insufficient.

• 42:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, the training for police officers is totally insufficient. And it's horrible because it's a very difficult job that you should be training. I've been saying for the last several years that police officers should train 20% of the time. 20% of the time that they work, they should be training. And right now, it's not even, it's probably not even a measurable percentage of time that they're working. I mean, it's probably in the fractions of a percent that they're training. They get horrible training and they're in really dynamic situations and in doing an incredibly hard job. You don't know how to do that stuff. You know, that's another, you talked about the misconceptions of the street fight is the person that thinks, well, you know, when I, if someone messes with me, I'm just going to get wild and they think that's going to work and that's not going to

• 43:13Speaker 00

  work, especially against someone that's trained. So if you think that you're going to have some magical powers because you're angry or because your adrenaline is going, that's not, that's not true and it's going to, it's going to cost you in a big way.

• 43:25Chris Williamson?

  Especially if you come up against somebody like Tim Kennedy, who's genuinely trained.

• 43:29Speaker 00

  Oh, for sure. Yeah. And, and you know, this day and age, well, I mean, I live in San Diego, California. A lot of people train, a lot of people train. I wouldn't say it's the majority of people train, but there are a lot. If you get in a fight in San Diego, there's a decent chance you're fighting against someone that knows how to fight. And look, there's jujitsu on every street in San Diego, jujitsu academies. So yeah, if you just think you're going to be a tough guy, it's, it's going to be rough. It's going to be a rough tour.

• 44:01Chris Williamson?

  I saw a video the other day that you may have seen as well of Tim talking about changes he was making to his everyday carry. You see this?

• 44:07Speaker 00

  I don't, I don't think so.

• 44:09Chris Williamson?

  He was changing the weapon that he was using, the pistol, because recently, some of the active shooters have been using body armor. So he's now gone to a relatively small caliber, but a armor piercing round. Are you concerned about this increasing sophistication that seems to be coming from people that are shooters?

• 44:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's a little, there's an escalation there, right? But

• 44:38Speaker 00

  that's a, the, the military went through this with the people we were fighting. They start wearing body armor. Cool. Roger that. You want to wear body armor? We'll, we'll get armor piercing rounds. Yeah, the, it, it's just a natural escalation of things, unfortunately, but it's the way it is.

• 44:58Chris Williamson?

  It's kind of like the predator prey dynamic, right? Of evolution?

• 45:02Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah. The, the enemy is going to make adjustments and we're going to have to adjust back.

• 45:07Chris Williamson?

  What are your principles for an everyday? Are you allowed? Can you have an everyday carry in, in San Diego?

• 45:13Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 45:13Chris Williamson?

  Right. What are your principles that you follow for, for that?

• 45:16Speaker 00

  The, the same as a normal person that wants to protect themselves.

• 45:24Chris Williamson?

  Well, we had this recent 4th of July shooting, right? And then before that, we had Uvalde. And then before that, we had Buffalo. Have you got any idea if this is the sort of thing that can be stopped or can be restricted in some way?

• 45:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, I did. I did some podcasts on these things and some of the biggest, or I would say, one of the most startling things about as you watch the evolution of this. So in in 1955 in America, there was 340 inpatient beds for people with mental health issues per 100,000 people. So for every 100,000 people in America, there was 340 inpatient beds for those people, from people with mental health problems. In 2007, it was 17 beds

• 46:21Speaker 00

  per 100,000. So the mental health capacity for treatment in America has gone down in a, what, 95%?

• 46:36Speaker 00

  And there are some legitimate reasons why this happened. And a lot of it had to do with the fact that people were getting put in these institutions and there were some horrible abuses that were going on in some of these mental institutions, people being committed that didn't want to be in there, people that were abused once they were in there, people that could never get out of there. And there was a backlash against that. And it all of a sudden became in the 70s, hey, this, this mental health, these mental health facilities are evil, they're bad, there's abuse going on, we need to shut them down. And they shut down a lot of them. And so in doing that, it certainly appears to me that they threw the baby out with the bathwater. And now we've got, I mean, you think San Diego, there's two or three million people here.

• 47:22Speaker 00

  There's a lot of people that need help, that need help, mental health help. And there's just not a great place to get it. I talk to police officers a lot. Police officers come upon people all the time that they don't need to get put in jail. They need to get put in some kind of a mental health facility, but they don't exist. And so they go into jail for a little while, they they come back out and it's a problem. So, so if you take just the numbers of the beds, right? What has that done to all the other aspects of mental health? Like, what about the outpatient people? How many doctors used to be ready to help somebody that was feeling depressed or was feeling angry? There probably were a lot more doctors back then that had the capability of treating those things.

• 48:07Speaker 00

  So we've, we've really shut down our capacity to help people from a mental health perspective. And then on top of that, we've added all these things into society that create more mental health problems. I E. Drugs, alcohol, social media, the, the, the fact that someone can stay in their house all the time. But then we put COVID on people where they had to stay in their house all the time. They're getting stuck in echo chambers. There's all these things that add to mental health problems and we've, we've really done away with a lot of the treatment that we had before. So hopefully in, in the coming months and years, we can start to get back to a place

• 48:46Speaker 00

  where we start to build up our capacity for treating help people that have mental health issues. Because these, these shooters in these scenarios, they clearly are, they have mental health problems.

• 49:00Chris Williamson?

  Well, it's a trend as well that's dominated by young men, it seems. And that, that seems especially sad because these are men that could be out working a job or starting a business or being in the armed forces, contributing to something. And instead they're off on a rampage somewhere.

• 49:16Speaker 00

  It's horrible to see.

• 49:18Chris Williamson?

  One of the differences, we were talking before we started about the differences between the US and the UK. I've spent a lot of time, late nights in city centers, working nightclubs. And I've spent a lot of time around homeless people. At two in the morning, the only people that are out are club promoters and, and homeless people and, and party goers. And the difference between homeless people in the UK and homeless people in the US is more stark than the difference between the cultures by distance. They are.

• 49:51Chris Williamson?

  Significantly more

• 49:55Chris Williamson?

  antsy, evidently in discomfort and, and talking to themselves, shuffling along, rocking backward and forward. Much more forthcoming, significantly more forthcoming, significantly more aggressive. Even though I've never had anything super bad happen.

• 50:16Chris Williamson?

  Downtown San Diego, downtown Denver, downtown Austin. I haven't spent a ton of time in America, but I mean, there are a lot of them. And the safety net that we have in the UK to sweep up people who fall through the cracks like that is, it, it, it seems to work, right? You know, someone, someone ends up in a really bad way mentally.

• 50:38Chris Williamson?

  Away you go, we'll pop you into a ward, you'll be looked after, we'll be given the medication that you need. There's no insurance that restricts that. But as you said earlier on, it's like a vicious cycle of the people who are the ones that are the most vulnerable are the ones that maybe get sent to jail, perhaps to get hooked on drugs. The drugs make their mental health conditions worse, which means that they can, they've further ingrained themselves into a life of either crime or homelessness, which takes them further away from a job and a balanced life. And yeah, I mean, it kind of doesn't surprise me, but it's, it's pretty sad to see.

• 51:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'd be interested to know the numbers of, of inpatient beds per hundred thousand in the UK. Because if you think about the homeless people that you've seen in San Diego, and there's two million people here, right? There's a lot of those people that probably would be swept up and put into a place where they're getting the right mental health treatment that they need. And mental health treatment is not an easy thing to do. It can take an extended period of time to get someone sorted to a point where they're able to be, go out and contribute to society. So yeah, I'd be interested to know those numbers. And even from what you're saying right now, my guess is England's probably doing a better job of getting people the help that they need.

• 51:46Chris Williamson?

  How long have you been married now?

• 51:48Speaker 00

  I think twenty five years.

• 51:53Chris Williamson?

  And you met your wife in Bahrain, right?

• 51:55Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 51:56Chris Williamson?

  Do you remember the story about the first thing that you said to her?

• 51:58Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 51:59Chris Williamson?

  Would you tell that?

• 52:00Speaker 00

  Uh, yeah, so I was on a, on a deployment in the Navy. I was on a ship.

• 52:10Speaker 00

  While we were on a ship, this is back before internet on ships and we, to occupy our time. When you're a SEAL on a ship, there's nothing to do. You don't have a job, so you just sleep, eat and lift is our joke. And you can only sleep, eat and lift so long. And then we, we had a certain selection of movies on videotapes. And so one of the movies that we had was Ace Ventura Pet Detective with Jim Carrey. And so we did a lot of imitating Ace Ventura Pet Detective. And when I, so we eventually went to Bahrain. My, the other squad, there's two squads in a SEAL platoon. The other squad had actually gone to Bahrain before us. Squad two went to Bahrain for a few days. They were ahead of us and we didn't know anything about Bahrain. We didn't know what was going on there because there's, again, there's no internet.

• 52:54Speaker 00

  You just know some, going to some random place in the desert. And squad one had work to do, so we stayed on the boat for a couple of extra days. And then when we finally flew to Bahrain, squad two was waiting for us and they were, they were saying, hey, this place is like, there's good times to be had. There's bars and girls and the whole nine yards. And so they had like, they were staged and ready to take us out. And yeah, we went to a bar and I, and I, a big giant packed kind of club slash bar. And then I saw a tall, beautiful blonde woman. And actually, actually, one of my friends in squad two had said to me, oh, there's these two girls.

• 53:38Speaker 00

  You're going to be, he's like, I know you're going to talk to them. And he was kind of a shyer guy. And I said, I'm sure, I'm sure it'll work out with you, man. You're, you'll do fine. And sure enough, walked in this bar, saw my, saw my future wife. And I just walked, I walked up to her and I said, in like a Jim Carrey tone. I said, uh, should I just call you Aphrodite's goddess of love? And she looked at me like I was an idiot, which was accurate. And then, you know, I bought her a drink and the rest, as they say, is history.

• 54:08Chris Williamson?

  How did you save that? I, I, I want to know how you turned that opening line around.

• 54:15Speaker 00

  You know, it was, I did it in a ridiculous enough way that she could probably tell I wasn't taking myself too seriously. I mean, it wasn't serious, right? So if you're not being serious, she laughed and we were good. I didn't, I didn't say it. I didn't say, should I just call you Aphrodite, goddess of love? No, if I would have said that, I probably wouldn't have ended up with her. But I was having fun.

• 54:39Chris Williamson?

  What have you learned since being married to a Brit?

• 54:43Chris Williamson?

  Is there anything that you think has been a unique insight?

• 54:48Speaker 00

  You know, Britain, England, the UK, long allies with America, even though I guess originally it didn't start off that way, clearly.

• 54:57Chris Williamson?

  Look, the 4th of July was a very difficult day for me. It was a very difficult day. Happy treason day to all of the ungrateful colonialists.

• 55:06Speaker 00

  No, I, I, I love the historical aspects of England. You know, the, the, the military that I've worked with, the Brits that I've worked with, kind of to me represent what I think of when I want, when I think of England and when I, the way I, the way I kind of hold England and the UK in an elevated way in my mind, the, the British military that I've worked with have maintained that standard, completely professional, stiff upper lip, squared away, ready to work, and just, just, just the, really just professional. And that's the way I always think of England.

• 55:50Chris Williamson?

  I'm interested here in the disciplining process of getting married and becoming a father, because you were someone who had already worked hard on being disciplined, but this feels like a very different type of discipline to the discipline to put up with a baby that won't stop crying. It's the discipline to be able to comfort somebody while you're away from them. That to me feels like a different sort of frequency of, of discipline. And I'm interested in what you've found as a challenge and what you've found as, whether your military career

• 56:35Chris Williamson?

  had prepared you for marriage and fatherhood effectively.

• 56:43Speaker 00

  Well, first of all, insane amount of credit goes to my wife who is just, she, one of the things I've tried to explain to people about her is that she was emotionally independent, meaning she didn't need me to, to bolster her up and

• 57:09Speaker 00

  she handled everything. She handled everything on the home front, literally everything. And I would just go and go do my job and she never complained about that. She never made any comments about it. It was, she knew kind of the priority for me was my job. And that later on in life, and, and that strategically in our lives, the, the priority was the family, but she also knew that while I was in the SEAL teams, that was my number one priority. She knew that and I told her that. And she said, yeah, I know. I get it. You take care of your team. You take care of your platoon. You take care of your task unit.

• 57:51Speaker 00

  And I got this. I got these kids and this house and all that other stuff. And she never complained. She never, she just, she just did it. And so the, the majority, the vast majority of credit goes to my wife for being an awesome human being, an awesome mom to our kids. And I was, I would love to give you some kind of, this is what you need to look for. And, and that's probably the best I could do, but I can't say that I looked for it. I got very, very lucky. I got very lucky that my wife was, was,

• 58:29Speaker 00

  look, you can judge her looks and I, obviously she was and is a beautiful woman. But the luck part was she was, like I said, emotionally independent. She was strong to be able to handle just, just mayhem, mayhem on a pretty regular basis. You know, not, you know, from, from having a bunch of kids to I'm gone on deployment and my wife is going to visit my wounded guys in the hospital or going to my guys' funerals. That's what she was doing. So.

• 59:09Speaker 00

  You know, team effort for sure, but she's the MVP and I'm just sort of, you know, the, the, the bench, the bench warmer over here.

• 59:19Speaker 00

  The

• 59:21Speaker 00

  the, now, all that being said, the, the, you know, from the military, look, taking ownership of things, which, which I already talked about a little bit, but there's nothing really that goes on in my family that I don't, that, that I would say no, to my wife, no, that's your fault. Cause I can just about guarantee that everything is my fault. When, when there's something that's not right, when there's something going wrong, it, it's something that I, it's a mistake that I made. I did something wrong. De-escalation, right? Because my wife, while borderline saint, there, you know, she's a human being. A lot of my friends would argue that she's just a saint, but she is a human being. And,

• 1:00:05Speaker 00

  you know, she might get mad about something. She might get frustrated with me about something. And being able to de- de-escalate those situations and not, not escalate them is very, very beneficial. And one of the best ways to do that is by taking ownership when something goes wrong. So I would say the de-escalation part, taking ownership is definitely beneficial.

• 1:00:31Speaker 00

  If you're blaming your, your wife, you're probably, that's not going to work out great. And, and just the idea of,

• 1:00:40Speaker 00

  you know, trying to win, trying to win an argument. I mean, first of all, honestly, I don't really, or I, I, I don't really argue with my wife. I probably have been in less than a handful, less than three or four arguments in my life with my wife. And I can't even, I can't even really think of any right now. I'm just don't want to, you know,

• 1:01:02Speaker 00

  try and, try and make myself out to, or make our relationship out to be something that's not, but we don't really argue very often. And so I can't even really say that, hey, don't try and win an argument with your wife, because I'm not really having an argument with my wife.

• 1:01:19Speaker 00

  I guess my, I guess my synopsis of this is pay attention to who you're gonna get married to. And try and pick someone that is emotionally independent. That has their own, has their own, that can handle life by themselves. And that can be, that can make some people feel insecure, right? Like I want someone that's relying on me all the time and I want them to feel like they need me. And that might be a trap for you if that's what you set yourself up with. So that's what I do. Find someone that's emotionally independent. Find someone that you get along well with. Find someone that's, that's calm.

• 1:02:03Speaker 00

  You know, someone that's not, you know, that's not gonna get, get bent out of shape about little things. And if they do, a little de-escalation can kinda get the problem solved. And then just have fun. You know, my wife and I have fun and I think that's important.

• 1:02:21Chris Williamson?

  It's very interesting to think about the fact that some people rely on a partner who is overly vulnerable. Or overly anxiously attached as a way to bolster their own sense of reassurance in a relationship. I've, I've seen this quite a lot.

• 1:02:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's probably not gonna be a great move. And look, you, a person, I don't, I don't know everyone. All I can do is talk for myself. And I would recommend you find someone that's more your equal. Someone that you can engage with, someone that's, someone that you're part of a team with, rather than someone that you're sort of domineering over.

• 1:03:00Chris Williamson?

  I learned this the other day, that there's only one sentence in the Bible about how you should choose a partner. And it says that you should choose someone that you could go to war with.

• 1:03:11Speaker 00

  Hmm, I like it. That, that works. That's legit.

• 1:03:17Chris Williamson?

  It's a team effort, a relationship, right? And would you purposefully choose a particularly vulnerable teammate? Because you're always going to be the person that's out in front? Probably not.

• 1:03:31Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah. Now to push back a little bit about that. Look, you, you, there's guys I would be number one on my list to go to war with. That probably are not going to be the best spouses in the world.

• 1:03:46Chris Williamson?

  You wouldn't get in a relationship with them?

• 1:03:48Speaker 00

  They're, they're going to be, they're going to be tough for, for a female to be married to. Because they're, they're wild, right? They're wild animals and they're the exact type of person that you would want to go to war with. And that I've gone to war with and a lot of times they're, they're not going to be great. As, as husbands.

• 1:04:06Chris Williamson?

  Fair point. Yes. Yeah.

• 1:04:10Chris Williamson?

  People as well, I've been thinking recently, I spoke to Andrew Huberman last week. And he was explaining to me about the similarities between the grief process and the breaking up process. Apparently neurologically, it's incredibly similar. So distance in time and space and something else, I think. And he was talking about how when you go through a breakup, it is the same networks that are activated as through grief. And as somebody that has been to probably far more military funerals than we can remember or would have liked to.

• 1:04:48Chris Williamson?

  How does that inform your advice for people letting go of people that they lose in their life? Whether that be through a breakup or, or, or through them passing?

• 1:05:01Speaker 00

  I talked about this on my podcast one time and speaking of Jocko videos that are out there and people have made videos of this. Yes, I have definitely lost too many of my friends. And it took me a little while to start getting pattern recognition on what, what happens. And it's a very clear pattern. And once I kind of put that out there, I've now heard from many, many scores of people. That yep, that's what it feels like. And I think if you know what it's going to feel like, just like anything else, if you know what to expect, then it's easier to contend with. So it's like a storm that is hitting you. You know, you lose someone, someone that you know dies, you are gonna get put into a storm.

• 1:05:47Speaker 00

  And what's scary about it is it's it's an emotional storm and you have no control over it. So you're gonna break down, start crying, you're gonna remember bad things, good things. You're not gonna be in control of your emotions, which is very difficult for adults because we're used to having some level of control over our emotions. So for a period of time, you're gonna get hit with waves of emotion that you have no control over. And they're gonna knock you off your feet and you're not gonna be able to finish a sentence. You're gonna, it's it's very, very difficult.

• 1:06:15Speaker 00

  But over time, that storm is going to fade a little bit. And those those waves are gonna get weaker.

• 1:06:25Speaker 00

  And and those waves still may come. So I don't know if you've lost anyone that's close to you.

• 1:06:30Chris Williamson?

  No, which is one of the reasons that I'm I'm an only child to parents, like dogs, dogs is it. So I have a particular um interest.

• 1:06:42Speaker 00

  Right, so there's gonna be times where it's been a month since your friend died and you're gonna be sitting there and you're gonna hear a song or you're gonna smell a burger that you you you once had with this individual. And you're gonna get overcome with those waves of emotion again. And you might start crying right there, you might have this massive wave of emotion hit you.

• 1:07:04Speaker 00

  And it'll and then it'll subside. And over time, the waves will become weaker and they'll become less frequent. And and here's where people also get into trouble. They think that that means that they didn't care about that person. And that's not true at all, it's just that your mind is processing it and it's okay. So that's what happens. You start off with these huge uncontrollable emotional storm. That storm will pass, that's number one, just know that that storm is normal. And it's gonna pass. And then it's gonna still hit you, but over time, those waves of sadness and sorrow are gonna get weaker and they're gonna get less frequent. And that's okay, that's a good thing.

• 1:07:49Speaker 00

  And look, I haven't broken up with a with a girl in a long time. But I'm, you know, when when people ask me about breaking up with girls is, you know, I've what you have to do when it's not working with a girl is wish them luck.

• 1:08:08Speaker 00

  Give them the best of luck, wish them luck, walk away and don't look back. And you're still gonna get those emotions, those things are still gonna hit you, but walk away and don't look back. And there's two reasons for that. Number one, if there's any chance that it's gonna work out, the best possible way for you to get it to work out is by walking away, by wishing them luck, walking away and don't look back. That's the best way.

• 1:08:30Chris Williamson?

  How so?

• 1:08:31Speaker 00

  Because if there is something there, then she will let you know eventually.

• 1:08:39Speaker 00

  And if there's nothing there, you're gonna know that too, because you never hear from her again. That's fine. The protocol for getting her back is to walk away and don't look back. That's the protocol, is to move on. The protocol, if she doesn't want you back, is to walk away and don't look back. So, look, and I know it's hard, but you'll, you'll get some of those waves, but those waves will become less frequent and they'll become less powerful. And eventually you can move on. And then, you know, the last thing I'll say about this is in both these scenarios is remember, but don't dwell. So, so you got it, you look, you remember your friends, you honor your friends, you remember what they gave you, what they taught you, what you learned from them, what was great about them, what you miss about them, you remember all those things,

• 1:09:21Speaker 00

  but you don't dwell in the past and, and dwell on those thoughts and dwell on the loss all the time, because that's not healthy either, and it's not, not gonna help you, and it's not what your friend would want you to do anyways.

• 1:09:32Chris Williamson?

  I like the insight around when you are going through grief,

• 1:09:39Chris Williamson?

  and then you stop the sense of guilt that comes through, because you feel now somehow that you're doing a disservice to their memory, like you didn't really care, or something like that.

• 1:09:53Speaker 00

  Yep. It helps to,

• 1:09:57Speaker 00

  you know, it helps to write about, what, what I've told people to do is write that personal letter, and tell them what you loved about them, what you're gonna miss about them, how you felt about them, what you regret. You write all that stuff in a letter, put it in an envelope, bring it to their grave and put it there. And, and that will help you process as well. I mean, I've unfortunately or fortunately, I've, I've given a bunch of eulogies for friends that I've lost. And in the beginning, I didn't really recognize that that's a way of healing, but certainly writing down your emotions, your feelings, what you're going to miss, what you loved about them is very therapeutic, and it's very good. And so that's another thing I recommend is you write that stuff down and, and you, you bring it to them.

• 1:10:44Chris Williamson?

  That's another Petersonism from his Rules for Life. He says, "If memories still make you cry, write them down."

• 1:10:51Speaker 00

  Yep. That's a, you know, I talk a lot about being able to detach from your emotions, and it's very important. Well, when you write something down, you are literally detaching from those thoughts because they're going out on a piece of paper that you then you can see. So it's a very important thing to do to write down. If there's emotions that you have to deal with, write down. And I just like to give someone some kind of an objective. So instead of just saying, "Write down the emotions," no. Here's, write that person. Tell them. And that will kind of be like a writing prompt to get you to write the right things about that situation.

• 1:11:27Chris Williamson?

  I'm pretty interested in your impact on kids. So I had a comment from a father saying how much he couldn't wait for this episode because his son's read all of your books. And we're timing my nine-year-old's mile run times every week because of Jocko. So if, if nothing else, there is a nine-year-old out there with his dad stood with a stopwatch as he sprints around a park on a Saturday morning or something at the moment. What, what business does a SEAL have writing kids' books?

• 1:11:57Speaker 00

  Well, I don't know necessarily if any SEAL has any business doing anything. I know that I have four kids and that I wanted to, when, when I was raising my kids, there was, there wasn't really any books that carried the message of the values that I wanted my kids to have.

• 1:12:16Speaker 00

  And so I just wrote my own and there you go. Pretty straightforward.

• 1:12:21Chris Williamson?

  Is that similar to you? Do you think entering into the, is there a reflection there from the SEALs? The fact that there wasn't a guidebook or a handbook for operations when you first came in? And you've almost had this twice. You've had this in both your career and in fatherhood as well.

• 1:12:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, like there is, there is some weaknesses to not having doctrine. And there's also some strength when you do have doctrine. And you know, you know, that boiled down to, I was very lucky that I joined the military. Cause when I joined the military, it was, I had a structure, a pathway to execute on. And that's very, very beneficial for a young idiot kid that's filled with energy and rebellion and aggression. That's, that's awesome. Here, take all that energy and aggression and rebellion and, and focus in this direction. It's going to be beneficial and you'll actually get rewarded for it. You'll get promoted for it. That's amazing.

• 1:13:20Speaker 00

  And kids didn't really have any kind of a code where, hey, these are some general rules that will, that you will benefit from in life. And so there you go. That's the warrior kid.

• 1:13:36Chris Williamson?

  What about kids or the parents of kids that are being bullied in school? This to me seems like a very unique challenge for generally for people to come up against. Because a lot of the time you're able to have an impact on a situation. You're able to do something that moves it forward, but you know, you can go and have a conversation with the head teacher or whatever, but that, that doesn't necessarily fix culturally sort of what's going on within the school. There's only so much that teachers can do in terms of oversight. You can't go into the school and punch the other kid in the face. That's also not the solution as much as you might want to do that.

• 1:14:12Speaker 00

  Well, it's not going to help your kid any either, right? You, you have to train your kid to be able to contend with the world, not tell your kid that you're always going to be there to back them up and beat up anyone that gets in their way. Like that's not going to help your kid become a better human. So no, what you want to do is teach your kid, what you want to do is to actually teach your kid how to fight. You want your kid to train jujitsu. You want your kid to train boxing. You want your kid to be an actual force to be reckoned with. And, and what's crazy about this is, you know, as you mentioned earlier.

• 1:14:45Speaker 00

  If there's a bigger, a much bigger person than you, they can still beat you up. You know, and that's the thing with kids, you know, if you're 10 years old, you can be a really well-trained 10-year-old, but a 14-year-old is probably going to get the better of you and maybe 15-year-old. But there's still going to be situations that it's going to be, you're going to lose a fight. That being said, the risk for the bully goes exponentially higher. When he knows that he's got someone on his hands that can actually, actually knows how to fight. And so the probability of bullying taking place goes way down, way down. And even if that bully wins the fight, he's not going to look good.

• 1:15:29Speaker 00

  It's going to be a problem. He, he's gonna, he's gonna get a, a, a victory, a worthless victory. Because he's going to beat up, he's going to barely get the better of someone that's a lot smaller than, than the bully himself. So, and all this stuff, all this stuff, I guess we could talk to Andrew Huberman. But this is stuff you recognize, there's a, there's a primal recognition of someone that knows how to fight. And someone that doesn't. And this is, this is, kids can recognize this. They recognize, oh, I'm getting in this kid's face and he doesn't seem to be bothered by this. And he's got a little bit of a smile on his face.

• 1:16:13Speaker 00

  I might not want to push this any further. And, and that's a real thing. So jujitsu, boxing, wrestling, Muay Thai will elevate that primordial confidence in a young man or a young, a young boy or young girl that is going to prevent so much bullying from happening. That it's incredible. So, look, can you still get beat up? Yes, you absolutely can. Are you probably going to do okay? Yes, you most likely are. Is your, now, what's, what's lame is, you know, if you go back pre UFC.

• 1:16:53Speaker 00

  There'd be martial arts instruction that would, hey, we're gonna help your kid with their confidence.

• 1:17:01Speaker 00

  And they would, kids would get more confident, but it wasn't based on reality, you know, going back to the Detroit, you know, your friend at the Detroit Defense Tactics or whatever.

• 1:17:10Chris Williamson?

  Don't you call him my friend.

• 1:17:11Speaker 00

  Going back to that guy, he's teaching things that might help someone's confidence, but they're not gonna help in real life.

• 1:17:17Chris Williamson?

  Yes. Is that potentially even more dangerous?

• 1:17:19Speaker 00

  Oh, it's infinitely more dangerous. Because a kid that knows jujitsu, a 10-year-old kid that knows jujitsu, and there's a 14-year-old kid, that kid knows, hey, even though I know jujitsu, it's gonna be a problem. This kid's a lot bigger than me. He's probably stronger than me, and this is gonna be a problem. I need to figure out a way to de-escalate this. As opposed to getting told, hey, all you have to do is this strike and that strike, and then you'll win a fight. No, that's actually not true. So, yes, that is more harmful to have somebody with fake confidence. That's a real problem. But in training and in becoming stronger, in being able to do pull-ups, in being able to run, you know, for the young kid that's running, that kid's got some good cardio if he's timing his mile runs, right?

• 1:18:00Speaker 00

  All those things are gonna help make a more capable human who is a lot less likely. By the way, he's more confident. Guess what else he has when he's more confident? He's got more friends. His friends are now looking at this bully going, hey, man, you don't wanna mess with our friend. And now we have a situation where it's probably gonna get de-escalated just because of of schoolyard politics and primal politics that that play out between any group of human beings.

• 1:18:26Chris Williamson?

  I'll never forget when I was in secondary school, one of my friends, Carl, his granddad was a judo teacher and had been for a very, very long time, and Carl had done it since he could walk. As soon as he walked, he was doing judo, and he's now 14, 15. And there's one of those kids in school that must have hit puberty at nine or something. And this guy's huge, and he was one of the the big bullies in school. And I'll never forget that he squared up to him, and Carl was grinning in his face, smiling in his face. Just couldn't wait for something to happen. And I think that that kind of highlights. One of the main differences, getting in a fight is probably not that bad as a kid. In fact, it could be a useful formative experience to make you,

• 1:19:12Chris Williamson?

  to educate you in the future about what it feels like to be in a physical altercation with people. The thing that's concerning is the fear around the fight, right? It's the anxiety and the worries about the bullying. So in a way, yes, the skills, you need to have the skills that actually back up. You don't want to have a reality which is detached from what you predict is going to happen. But one of the most important things is to just feel comfortable in a situation that is going to become dynamic.

• 1:19:43Speaker 00

  Hundred percent. You know, I tell this when I start talking to women about self-defense.

• 1:19:51Speaker 00

  If you have never had someone grab hold of you, the mental hurdle you have to get over just to be able to respond in an adequate way is immense. That mental hurdle is immense. If you do jiu-jitsu, someone's grabbing a hold of you 27 times a day on the mat. They're grabbing your neck, they're grabbing your arm. You're totally used to this, to this close proximity combat that you're entering into. So, yes, a huge benefit of training to fight is that you don't have any mental hurdle to get over. Your friend that trained judo his whole life, he was just ready to rock and roll at that point. There's no fear whatsoever. This is what he does every single day.

• 1:20:33Speaker 00

  That's, again, a great reason to get out there and train.

• 1:20:38Chris Williamson?

  It's kind of like a superpower.

• 1:20:40Speaker 00

  Yes, it's a hundred percent. Jiu-jitsu is a hundred percent a superpower. There's no doubt about it. I mean, it's a hundred percent. You know what, that's, one of my kids asked me when, it was my son. He asked me when he was a little kid, the movie The Incredibles came out. And he said, hey dad, is there really such a thing as superpower? And I said, hmm. Yes, there is. It's a little thing that you do every day. It's called jiu jitsu. And and eventually he realized that, oh, I I can actually fight anybody and it's going to be fine. And that's a very beneficial thing to have. Because there's always, I guess I'm a little bit biased because of the way kind of the

• 1:21:23Speaker 00

  how I grew up. There's always violence. There's always some sort of inferred level of violence. I mean, a seal platoon, there's a pecking order, you know, and it has to do with with fighting. And and that's the same with any group of of of knuckle dragger Neanderthal men that are in a group. There's always a guy that's that. Yeah, that guy's kind of he's the one that can kind of beat everyone up.

• 1:21:47Speaker 00

  It's the way it is. So I'm sorry that it's that way. I'm sorry. It's not a cerebral contest, but man.

• 1:21:52Chris Williamson?

  Well, there's only two forms of communication. One of them is words and the other one is violence. And when the first one fails, that's when the second one comes about. And I I absolutely think I've dude, I've stood on the front door of a thousand club nights, right? I've met about a million people stood on the front door of nightclubs. I have seen literally hundreds of fights occur when people have had a bit to drink. And I spoke to a an anthropologist. And he was drawing parallels between the ways that particularly guys when they first start to fight, especially if their inhibitions are lowered a little bit. And he was drawing a parallels between that and the way that other animals fight as well. So he said, one of the first things that you'll see men do is that they'll start to circle each other. He said, what do deer do?

• 1:22:37Chris Williamson?

  You know, when they've got the they've got their antlers and they'll circle what they're doing, they're kind of sizing each other up and they'll circle and they'll circle and they'll circle. And then they'll come in and they'll push first, maybe. And what's that doing? Oh, it's getting kind of a feel for what's going on. It's getting a sense of just how big is it? Do I really, really want to go? Do I want to go? Do I? Right. I'll give it a and then maybe you come back and do it again and then circle a little bit more and circle a little bit more. I thought it was so fascinating.

• 1:23:03Speaker 00

  Do I really want to go? Do they really want to go too? Like, maybe I can just get away with a push and they'll realize that. Yeah, there's some definite comparisons there. There's I'm sorry to inform everybody, but we're animals and that stuff shines.

• 1:23:16Chris Williamson?

  Some of us more than others.

• 1:23:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, some of us more than others.

• 1:23:21Chris Williamson?

  I just thought that you were talking about women doing Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. Is there a particularly unique challenge? I mean, women are very hardwired to avoid being grabbed and laid on by a man that's much larger than them, even if it is in a controlled situation, even if it is in a class or whatever. Are there some particularly unique challenges that girls have when they begin to do Brazilian Jiu Jitsu? Or have you found that there are hurdles that girls have to get over just generally? Is there something like innate in their programming that causes them to react in a different way?

• 1:24:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, I would say it's not normal for a girl or a woman to want some dude all up on them. And that's what Jiu Jitsu is. You are all up on each other. And you know, it's a very, for lack of a better word, it's very intimate contact that you're having with another human being. So there's, it is a hurdle. It's absolutely a hurdle for women and girls to get over. And once they get over it, it's like, okay, cool. And then it's much better to get over it on the mats in a Jiu Jitsu academy than it is to have to contend with that psychological hurdle when you're in a problematic scenario and you're being attacked.

• 1:24:48Speaker 00

  That is not the time to try and figure out what matters and what doesn't matter, and what this feels like and what that feels like. And yeah, you want to train and you want to overcome that hurdle in a nice, safe environment.

• 1:25:00Chris Williamson?

  Thinking about the bullying topic, I was considering about what that causes in later life. So I had a bit of a tough sort of school upbringing with bullying and stuff like that.

• 1:25:14Chris Williamson?

  And I was thinking about it, reflecting on it a lot. And I realized that a lot of the things that that created downstream in later life are the things that I most value in myself. And this has been a very difficult thing for me to kind of pass, to just work out like, hang on, do I need to thank the bullies in a way? Have they created...

• 1:25:40Chris Williamson?

  Some of the things in myself that I most value. So for instance, moved out to America to come and do the podcast, that has only been afforded to me really because I don't care about being solitary. I don't care about being on my own. I don't care about taking risks because for a very long time I was, in any case, on my own and everything was a risk. Going to school was a risk or going out for lunch was a risk or whatever. And then thinking about how, thinking about how I notice certain things, right? I went to a party not long ago and was obsessed about the fact, for about the first five minutes obsessed about half of the people had taken their shoes and socks off, but half of the people had only taken their shoes

• 1:26:23Chris Williamson?

  off and left their socks on. But the reason that I was paying so much attention is because in school, I would obsess over the way that certain kids had their hair cut, or the way that they would carry their bag, or the way that they would do their tie, because I was sure that that was the reason that they had friends and I didn't. I was trying to deconstruct in other people socially what was going on with them that meant that they, and I obviously, I didn't realize it's that they were sociable probably and were communicating well and whatever, you know, classic only child with like sprinkling of autism or whatever. So like, but I really value that. I value the fact that I pay that much attention. And it got me thinking more and

• 1:27:07Chris Williamson?

  more about a lot of the things that we really value in ourselves as adults are the light side of something that we probably are a little bit embarrassed about. And I was wondering whether,

• 1:27:24Chris Williamson?

  first off, whether you see that dynamic in yourself, whether there are, there are things that you most value that have costs that you need to pay. And then also whether perfect childhoods create weak adults.

• 1:27:38Speaker 00

  So going back to the conversation I had with Sam Harris, he kind of called me out on the fact that I had said something along the lines of combat was sort of when I most felt alive and I wouldn't trade it for anything. And I also would say the worst days of my life were in war, losing my friends and war is horrible. And the way I responded to it, and I asked him if he had anyone had ever known anyone that had cancer and had come out the other side. And he said, yes. And I said, oftentimes those people say, I wouldn't wish it on anybody, but I'm glad it happened to me because it gave me such a better perspective

• 1:28:23Speaker 00

  about life and about value and about the fragility of life and all those things. And that's the way I feel about combat. I don't wish it on anybody, but I wouldn't, wouldn't give it up. I wouldn't trade it for anything. And so I think what you're talking about is a great way of looking at your past to say, oh, okay. Um, I had some hardships and I benefited from those. It's basically the same thing as saying, got bullied? Good. Now I know how to handle myself a little bit better. I didn't have a bunch of friends? Good. Now I feel more comfortable when I'm alone. I think it's the same sort of attitude in, in both those situations.

• 1:29:00Speaker 00

  And then as far as, as far as how people are raised and what you get, it's, it's an interesting thing. And the, probably the only thing I can talk with any level of understanding of, and it's actually a lack of understanding, is basic SEAL training. Because basic SEAL training,

• 1:29:26Speaker 00

  you would think, well, you know, this person comes from a hard background. They didn't have much growing up. They're hungry. And now they have this opportunity and they're never going to quit. Or you say, oh, you know, this person went to a nice private school and they grew up with a silver spoon in their mouth. And when they get to this harsh environment, they're probably going to quit. And the fact is, that's not true in either one of those cases. Some kids that grew up in very tough environments, you know, working 18 hours a day on a dairy farm, they show up to BUDS and quit.

• 1:29:57Speaker 00

  And and some kids that grew up, you know, working eighteen hours a day on a dairy farm, they'll never quit. And some kids that grew up with a silver spoon in their mouth, they show up and quit. And some kids that show up with a silver spoon in their mouth, they never quit. So I think there's some inherent characteristic of a person that your environment plays a role, but it can be overcome by determination. And I think you probably have a lot more control over what you do in your life than your background does.

• 1:30:28Chris Williamson?

  That is the, I think, the genesis of why I love agency so much, why I love the ability to live your life by design, not by default. The fact that you get to forge whatever the path is that you want to go forward. Like that to me is, especially as someone that, like I say, maybe grew up feeling a little bit helpless. The fact that you realize, hang on, if I if I put this amount of work in and I dedicate myself and I'm committed and so on and so forth, the fact that you can come out the other side of that and realize that it has real world returns to you is it's phenomenal. It's it's one of the most rewarding, most empowering,

• 1:31:11Chris Williamson?

  I hate that word, but you know what I mean? It's kind of, it's what it's just been ruined, like empower empowerment has been ruined as a word, but it's actually really useful and I can't use anything else. But it's it's good. It's a it's a great feeling.

• 1:31:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, that kind of recognition is what allows people to move on in life and take control of their life and make things happen. And, you know, going back to your earlier thing about, you know, if you're in a relationship with someone and it's not working, saying, you know what, this isn't working and I'm going to move on. That's a good thing. You have to take ownership and that doesn't mean ownership, meaning I'm always at fault and therefore I'm going to sit here and do nothing. It's like, oh, I'm at fault for even being in this relationship with this person. I'm going to move on. No factor.

• 1:31:52Chris Williamson?

  I've heard you say that you wouldn't be doing anything that you're doing now if it wasn't for surfing. How so?

• 1:31:58Speaker 00

  Well.

• 1:32:02Speaker 00

  Surfing, I started surfing when I was 10 years old. I was very lucky that a guy decided to teach me how to surf. A lifeguard said, "Hey, I'm gonna teach you how to surf." And he did. And yeah, that's a huge, that completely directed my life because when you're looking at all the special operations units to go into, you know, there's Rangers, there's Special Forces, there's Marine Corps, Special Operations, there's all these different things that you can go and do. And one of them is primarily focused on the water and one of them, you can get stationed either in San Diego, California or Virginia Beach, Virginia. And it was just such a no-brainer for me.

• 1:32:40Chris Williamson?

  So are you saying that part of your military career was dictated by where the good surf was?

• 1:32:44Speaker 00

  100%. Yep, 100%. And making it through training, if I wouldn't have surfed, I may not have made it through training because your comfort level in the water is so high from surfing. And you know, I grew up surfing in New England and it's freezing cold. And so the cold water to me was a joke and the water problems were relatively easy for me compared to someone that didn't spend a bunch of time in the water. So surfing is a, is a great thing to have in your background if you're gonna go try and be a SEAL. Or you know, if you played water polo, if you're on the swim team, something that makes you super comfortable in the water is gonna be highly beneficial. And that's probably the biggest separator in people that make it, in fact, it is.

• 1:33:28Speaker 00

  People that make it and don't make it, if you're comfortable in the water, you have a much better chance of making it. If you're, let me rephrase that, if you're not comfortable in the water, your chance of making it through SEAL training is very small.

• 1:33:41Chris Williamson?

  So people that were swimmers in high school or whatever, massive, massive advantage?

• 1:33:47Speaker 00

  Massive advantage. Surfing, massive advantage. Water polo, massive advantage. Yep.

• 1:33:52Chris Williamson?

  I heard someone say the other day that if they could, if they could give their kids three sports to do throughout their, their childhood, one would be a martial art that's effective, one would be gymnastics to learn their body in space and one would be some sort of swimming, water-based event to learn their body in water. I thought.

• 1:34:10Speaker 00

  Those are, those are solid picks right there.

• 1:34:12Chris Williamson?

  Seems, seems like you're going to create a bit of a beast of a kid there.

• 1:34:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:34:15Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's um, the whole water thing, I mean, you see this, look at any event, look at CrossFit Games or something, right? And there's always one guy, because there's usually a swim, run, bike, or a paddleboard run, something else event in there. There's always one guy that swam in college. And you go, okay, so these people train six hours a day, five or six days a week for, forever. And they're the elite of the elite when it comes to fitness. And homeboy is, is half the time of the rest of the field. It, it can't be just due to fitness. It's got to be due to something. There's people with more capacity. He'll come 15th in a field of 40 of the overall. But on that event, you really do see the, the experience that, that someone that knows how

• 1:35:00Chris Williamson?

  to swim has. It's like worlds apart.

• 1:35:03Speaker 00

  Technique. It's, it's technique. Just like anything else. Just like jujitsu. Technique will win. Rock climbing, technique will win. It's interesting that people think you'd be able to fight without training, but you, why, why wouldn't you be able to play guitar without training? It's the same exact thing.

• 1:35:20Chris Williamson?

  Well, no, but when I get really angry, my guitar.

• 1:35:23Speaker 00

  Your guitar comes out.

• 1:35:24Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:35:25Speaker 00

  That's, that's what people think. Same thing with leadership. People think, oh, well, you can't really learn leadership. It's like, no, leadership is a skill, just like guitar is a skill. There's moves that are just like playing chords. And people don't understand that. And, and that's, you know, one of the reasons I am able to, that's why I have a company teaching leadership. Because it's like, oh, you mean, you're not just born with this? You mean, you're not just born knowing how to swim? You're not just born knowing how to play guitar? And you're not just born knowing how to lead? You have to learn how to do it.

• 1:35:55Chris Williamson?

  And you can learn how to do it.

• 1:35:58Speaker 00

  Oh, you can absolutely learn how to do it.

• 1:35:59Chris Williamson?

  As opposed to a fixed mindset of, this is me, this is where I'm at. I, I don't know guitar now, therefore I'm never going to know guitar. I'm not a leader now. I don't have creativity. You know, first thing that we, we spoke about. Can you explain to me, I've always wanted someone that knows surfing to explain this to me. Let's say that you're surfing a big swell and you go under. Can you explain how, how you get out from underneath a large wave when you're below the water? I've, I've heard about you swim out sideways and there's like a particular.

• 1:36:30Speaker 00

  Well, so in what you're talking about sideways, I'm assuming what you're talking about is certain breaks have a channel. Meaning the waves break in one area, but there's deeper water on either side of the break and therefore the waves don't break there. And you can see this in any, any of the big famous surf spots or many, most of the big famous surf spots, you can look and you can see there's a boat sitting here, taking pictures of people that are surfing the waves. That boat is sitting in deep water and the wave is breaking in shallow water. So generally, if you get, if you fall or you're trying to paddle back out, you go into the deep water and you paddle out and there's no waves breaking there.

• 1:37:08Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I thought it was, I thought it was something to do with the fact that if you were down, if you were taken under the water relatively deep below where the waves were, that trying to swim either toward land or back is a bad idea. I'm going to guess that.

• 1:37:20Speaker 00

  Oh, so what you're talking about is a, is a, is a rip current. So a rip current is an area of the beach where the, the waves are coming in and a rip current takes all the water that's coming in towards the, towards the beach and it all kind of funnels in one area and goes back out to sea. It's called a rip current.

• 1:37:36Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 1:37:36Speaker 00

  And if you try and swim directly into the beach, you won't be able to get there because that rip current can be going three knots or four knots can be strong and you can't swim that fast. And so you'll sit there and swim to exhaustion and you'll die. So what you do is you swim parallel to the beach and then you'll drift out a little further as you swim parallel, but eventually they'll swim out of the rip current, then you can swim into the beach.

• 1:38:01Chris Williamson?

  That's what I meant.

• 1:38:01Speaker 00

  Yep, there you go.

• 1:38:03Chris Williamson?

  There's two ways that life seems to be short to me. So one is in the fact that days go by pretty quickly and we seem to get old a lot sooner perhaps than we expect. And the other is that tomorrow is not necessarily promised to us and that things can end pretty quickly.

• 1:38:22Chris Williamson?

  How do you think people can remind themselves of this shortness of life? We're very distracted at the moment. There is always something that can take us away from the present moment and there are things that we're moving toward that are in the future. How can people remind themselves of the urgency that life has to it?

• 1:38:42Speaker 00

  I mean, you know, for me, it's real easy because I know that a lot of, a lot of my friends that are not here and

• 1:38:55Speaker 00

  that's all I need to, that's all I need to know. And I mean,

• 1:39:03Speaker 00

  I think about that every day. So there's no, for me personally, there's no, there's no lack of urgency when I wake up in the morning to think, oh, don't worry, I got all the time in the world. Because I know I don't. And I'm lucky to be here. And I'm going to try and live in a way that will at least do justice for my friends that aren't here.

• 1:39:25Chris Williamson?

  Tim Kennedy said that he'd looked back at a photo of maybe the graduating class that he was in, or certainly some, uh, unit that he was a part of. And he looked at it and he realized that he was the only person that was left from that photo, the only one. And, you know, it's one of those things, it's kind of like the, um, I got cancer and I, I sort of didn't want it, but I'm glad that it happened to me because on the other side of it, it's kind of feels a little bit like the same energy as that, that you go, well, do I want to lose all of my friends? No, absolutely not. Have I been able to, like alchemy, have I been able to take something from that? Like the bullying thing in later

• 1:40:11Chris Williamson?

  life, right? Have I been able to turn that, transmute that into something that I really value? Uh, and I suppose that that's one of the ways as well. It is about as good of a, forget eulogies, forget the service, forget the nice words. It's okay, because of what this person did for me while they were alive, now that they've passed, look at how much more I'm living. Look at, I mean, is there any better tribute to somebody?

• 1:40:41Speaker 00

  Definitely makes you appreciate the sunsets more.

• 1:40:45Chris Williamson?

  We were watching it last night. It's very, very nice over here. Another thing I've been thinking about with the shortness of life is the Sam 34. And it's only been within the last, maybe two years or so, two to three years, where age has started to actually feel like a thing. Now, obviously, it was a new age was a thing, but for most of your twenties, what you're doing is you're becoming stronger, faster, smarter. Everything continues to get better. And then there's a point, kind of like at the top of a roller coaster, where the inertia comes in and you feel everything be a bit weightless. And you start to realize what recovery from workouts is taking just a little bit longer than it used to.

• 1:41:25Chris Williamson?

  And injuries are taking a little bit more to get past. And I mean, the hangover thing has been happening since I was like 24. Like that just linearly got worse since I was 24.

• 1:41:36Chris Williamson?

  But there is a point at which you become kind of aware of your own mortality. Not in a, my friends have died way, but in a entropy way. Do you have any advice to men that are getting older and becoming chronically aware of that?

• 1:41:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, lift weights, do jiu jitsu, go for runs, stretch out, eat good, stop drinking.

• 1:42:03Speaker 00

  Pretty straightforward. If you don't, if you don't use it, you're going to lose it. Every day that you don't do work, you're going backwards. And it definitely will hurt you and it'll show up. You can't get away with what you got away with when you were 23. It doesn't work. You have to, you have to stay ahead of it.

• 1:42:28Chris Williamson?

  I had Nate Zinser, Dr. Nate Zinser. He's one of the special forces. He was their mindset coach, the psychology coach. And he was telling me, I was asking him, what, what age is it that you can finish applying for the SEAL? Is it 28, 25?

• 1:42:44Speaker 00

  It's it's 28. I think it's 28 or 29.

• 1:42:47Chris Williamson?

  And I asked, what's the reason for there being an upper bound? I mean, there's guys in their 30s that are super fit, the guys in the UFC in their 40s that are super fit. And he said, well, it's about what the body can tolerate, especially during selection. He was telling me the story about one of the climbing rope, climbing sections, 30 feet high over sand, and some 20, 21 year old kid fell from the top, flat on his stomach, and apparently just bounced off the floor and got up and started running. He thought, actually, yeah, if he was 38, that's a that's a very different reaction after you've dropped for 30 feet onto sand.

• 1:43:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, the training is gonna, it's gonna destroy, destroys kids. And so if you're not ready to recover very quickly, it's gonna be a problem. And I think, you know, are there people that could pull it off? Sure, there are. And there are. There are guys that get waivers that are 32 years old and they're super studs and they make it. But if you did, if you ran the numbers, which I'm sure the Navy ran the numbers and is like, oh, the, I mean, quite frankly, I just learned this figure the other day. People that are younger than 20 have like a 5% chance of making it through, of making it through basic SEAL training.

• 1:44:05Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 1:44:05Speaker 00

  Because they just don't have the the maturity and they might not be strong enough yet. And I mean, I would say the optimum age is probably like 23, 24. You're stronger. But, I mean, I was, I went through when I was young. I was 19 years old and, you know.

• 1:44:25Chris Williamson?

  And you were pretty slight compared with now, right? When you went through?

• 1:44:29Speaker 00

  I started, I was 174 when I went through.

• 1:44:31Chris Williamson?

  What are you, 6'1", 6'2"?

• 1:44:33Speaker 00

  5'11".

• 1:44:34Chris Williamson?

  Oh, yeah, okay.

• 1:44:35Speaker 00

  Yep. And 185 when I graduated. So I gained like 11 pounds going through SEAL training. And then, yeah, and, and which is, you know, when you're young, I mean, my body is just, you know, seeping testosterone, you know, 19 years old, you're working out all day long.

• 1:44:55Chris Williamson?

  Feeling it with chicken nuggets.

• 1:44:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, chicken nuggets, getting after it, just all the food you can possibly eat. It's, it's awesome.

• 1:45:03Speaker 00

  But it's an abusive training program. It's hard on the body. It trashes guys, for sure.

• 1:45:08Chris Williamson?

  I mean, hearing Goggins' stories about his three times through, I mean, he got, it was not due to quitting, right? I mean, his mentality was prepared to take him further than his body was twice. I mean, that must be brutal to think about the fact, I often think about this to do with athletes that get injured, how unfair it is that you get injured, because it's, you are ready to do the thing, and you may have done everything perfectly, and there's something, something outside of your control in your physiology that said, no, you don't get to do this.

• 1:45:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, the SEAL training is not fair at all. It's not fair at all. And there's, I'm sure there's good guys that don't make it because they just physically can't handle it. That being said, the way the program works,

• 1:46:04Speaker 00

  for the most part, if you don't make it, it's because you didn't make it. Like, they have guys-

• 1:46:09Chris Williamson?

  There's way more people that ring the bell than have blown out knees or whatever.

• 1:46:12Speaker 00

  It's eighty, it's probably eighty-five, ninety percent that ring out. Ten percent that get some injury that is incurable.

• 1:46:22Speaker 00

  Because they'll let you heal up. They let guys stay there for a while to heal up.

• 1:46:28Speaker 00

  But yeah, it's an abusive program.

• 1:46:31Chris Williamson?

  Say that with a smile on your face.

• 1:46:36Chris Williamson?

  Are there any other special forces selections that you're aware of that are comparable in terms of the difficulty?

• 1:46:47Speaker 00

  They're all, they're all hard. They all have their own tests, and they are all screening out a bunch of people. And I've only been through one, and they're all, they're all different ways of beating you up. I mean, you know, for instance, Ranger School, you don't eat a lot. So people lose twenty pounds during Ranger School.

• 1:47:07Chris Williamson?

  That's preparing them for being wilderness, isolation?

• 1:47:10Speaker 00

  In the field, yep. Special Forces has its own things to push you through. Everyone's got their own little- Techniques of getting rid of guys.

• 1:47:19Chris Williamson?

  SAS is a lot of orienteering. It's a lot of Brecon beacons. It's up and down hills, heavy Bergen packs.

• 1:47:25Speaker 00

  Yep. On your own. No, you don't know how much time you've got. They just say, do your best.

• 1:47:31Chris Williamson?

  Trying not to let us catch you.

• 1:47:32Speaker 00

  You didn't make the time. You're out.

• 1:47:34Chris Williamson?

  I mean, you didn't know what the time was, but.

• 1:47:36Speaker 00

  You didn't know what the time was, but it wasn't fast enough. In SEAL training, you're not allowed to wear a watch. So how fast do you have to run as fast as you can? At least for me, I had to run as fast as I could.

• 1:47:45Chris Williamson?

  In SEAL training, you're not allowed to wear a watch.

• 1:47:47Speaker 00

  Not allowed to wear a watch. You don't know how long anything is going to take. You don't know how long you've been swimming for. Your only choice is to go hard.

• 1:47:54Speaker 00

  That's, that's good, right? We just want you to go as hard as you can.

• 1:47:59Chris Williamson?

  I did a reality TV show about seven years ago and on that they removed all of our watches before we went in. And all of the clocks of the guys that came in to change the batteries on our microphones, they changed them all so they didn't tell the right time. The watches of the drivers, the cars that we got in and we never found out why that was the case. I thought, I think it was because uh, they didn't want us to know when we were going to bed and waking up because everyone was excitable and 18 or whatever.

• 1:48:31Speaker 00

  How long were you in the field for?

• 1:48:34Chris Williamson?

  I was in the show for about a month.

• 1:48:38Chris Williamson?

  But I mean, I'm.

• 1:48:39Speaker 00

  What were the, what, what kind of task were the timed tasks that you were, that you were executing?

• 1:48:43Chris Williamson?

  So unfortunately this isn't as reputable as doing a reality TV show about

• 1:48:51Chris Williamson?

  armed forces. This is a dating show and.

• 1:48:54Speaker 00

  Dating.

• 1:48:55Chris Williamson?

  Like dating, like a bachelor in paradise type thing. Yes.

• 1:48:59Speaker 00

  Scenario?

• 1:48:59Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 1:49:00Speaker 00

  Check.

• 1:49:02Chris Williamson?

  I'm not equating the two between doing buds and going on Love Island. But my point is that I think what they were trying to do was just uh, take the power from the people that were the subjects to the people that were in control and disorient the, the people that were there. Now they were actually, it wasn't like a. A challenge thing where people were having limited food or doing challenges to stay in and stuff like that. It was exclusively about romance. But what they'd found was that there was something, there must have been something that they thought that was effective by doing that. And thankfully, I just didn't have to, I didn't have to swim as much as, as you guys did. So I came out the other side of that feeling all right.

• 1:49:42Speaker 00

  I'm glad you made it.

• 1:49:43Chris Williamson?

  I did. Well, I mean, like, I'm here today. It was, it was difficult. Um, I spoke to Michael Punky Higgs. You know him? SEAL Commander Chief, Master Chief. I spoke to him and he's doing some stuff with psychedelics at the moment, which I found absolutely fascinating. And he very carefully walked me through the reason that he felt he needed. I mean, he'd had a gun to his head, I think, two or three times separately. He was really, really struggling. And he's doing, I think it's in Mexico is his, his place, where he's doing psychedelic therapy for veterans. What's your, what's your thoughts on, on that?

• 1:50:26Speaker 00

  Punky's awesome. Awesome guy. I'm glad you said Michael Punky Higgs, because otherwise I'd have said Mike. It would have taken me a minute. But yeah, Punky's an awesome guy. I, I've never tried that stuff. And I, I've definitely talked to a lot of guys that it's helped out. And if something's going to help guys out, I think it's good to go for people to go try it. But I haven't tried it myself. And I don't, I don't know, I don't know too much about it. I've had some friends that have done it. My friend Dakota Meyer had him on the podcast, and he talked about his experiences. I've talked to Tim Ferriss a decent amount about it, because

• 1:51:04Chris Williamson?

  He's huge into it at the moment, right?

• 1:51:05Speaker 00

  He is.

• 1:51:05Chris Williamson?

  Investing and

• 1:51:06Speaker 00

  Yeah. And before I had Dakota on, and I knew Dakota and I were going to talk about it, I actually called Tim and like, took notes, so that I had a better understanding, because I don't know, I don't know, I don't know enough about it to be able to comment on it. For me, it's just being on the outside, trying to, trying to explain, or at least share, I guess, share the story of people that have utilized them, and it's been helpful for. So I don't know a lot about it.

• 1:51:35Chris Williamson?

  Was it, was it Dakota that was talking, might have been on Rogan, about it's a type of patch, some sort of patch, or a single time thing that they maybe do on the neck?

• 1:51:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's, that's another thing. That's a, that's a

• 1:51:50Speaker 00

  Stella Gangly and Block, I believe it's called.

• 1:51:52Chris Williamson?

  That's it, yeah.

• 1:51:52Speaker 00

  And that's another thing that people use.

• 1:51:54Chris Williamson?

  That sounds absolutely wild. It's a single time thing.

• 1:51:59Speaker 00

  You do have to get it, you know, periodically, you know, every six months, every year. I forget what the date is, but yes, that's another thing that's been very effective for some people. So again, I'm, I'm, I'm not in any position to talk about this stuff with any, uh, with, with any knowledge whatsoever, other than, hey, I've, I've had some friends that have done it and they've said it's been useful. It's been helpful.

• 1:52:21Chris Williamson?

  Seals were very publicity shy for a long time and that trend of the, the quiet professional was, uh, pretty strong. Do you ever regret being so recognizable or, or well-known?

• 1:52:35Speaker 00

  I mean,

• 1:52:45Speaker 00

  I spent my whole life

• 1:52:49Speaker 00

  just kind of being very, you know, unrecognizable and, and there's some, there's some very nice things about that. And, you know, uh, when I, now that I'm, now that I'm more recognizable, you know, some of those advantages of being unrecognizable are gone, but

• 1:53:09Speaker 00

  for me, the, being able to help people out has been worth the, the pain. And I use that term very loosely, worth the, worth the, the small inconveniences of, you know, being recognized by, by people. And most of the people that recognize me are cool people that say, hey, man, listen to your podcast. Thanks. And I say, hey, man, no problem. You know, appreciate it. So it's, uh, you know, I'm not in some weird scenario. I don't have, you know, most people that listen to the podcast are pretty cool people and

• 1:53:43Chris Williamson?

  That you'd probably want to meet.

• 1:53:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, that I, that I would want to meet and hang out with and they usually have something positive to say or some insight that they can give me, something that I missed, something that they could clarify for me. So it's all good. No factor, really.

• 1:53:56Chris Williamson?

  I walked down Broadway in Nashville with Jordan Peterson on a Friday night last year. And that was, uh, that was a sight to behold. That was like, I mean, he managed to accumulate a queue of people to see as he walked down the street, he was, who's, what's that? Is that Jordan Peterson? Oh, and then he ended up buying a Stetson hat and doing like the Michael Jackson thing, like the walk.

• 1:54:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:54:24Chris Williamson?

  Uh, in an attempt to like, get through the crowd. Um, but yeah, I just thought, I thought it was interesting because you'd spent all of this time and, and again, you had this culture in the seals of the, the quiet professional and stuff. And I was interested in the price that, you know,

• 1:54:43Chris Williamson?

  it, it's kind of like being in service again, in a weird way, right? Yeah. I mean, you know, compared with going to war, people coming up to you in the street or wanting to take a selfie and stuff like, you know, not even in the same universe. But my point being that there is still, there's things that you have to put up with or do in order to get the message out there and your sense is that it's worth it.

• 1:55:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's, it's, it's fine. I mean, again, the amount of feedback that I get from people that are, that have benefited greatly is well worth, you know, any small inconveniences that I might have in my life. It's no factor.

• 1:55:23Chris Williamson?

  What do you think it was about, um, your task unit that ended up, it caused it to contain so many particularly elite operators? I mean, it seems to me like there's been a lot, I mean, you know, yourself, Leif, uh, Chris Kyle. Uh, was Latrell in there as well?

• 1:55:43Speaker 00

  No, he was not.

• 1:55:45Chris Williamson?

  But my point being like, it's, that's like a fairly illustrious list.

• 1:55:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, and I don't, I'm struggling to see, to remember what word you just used to describe the level of operators, but I mean, we were kind of normal, kind of a normal task unit, no- nothing spectacular. We had a, we, we got put into a combat environment that was a target-rich environment and went hard in, in, in that deployment. And, you know, that's, that's kind of how it turned out. You know, a SEAL team, a SEAL platoon, you're gonna get, it's, it's a bell curve like any other group and there's some awesome guys in every SEAL platoon. There's a bunch of really good guys in the SEAL

• 1:56:31Speaker 00

  platoon and there's a couple, you know, not so awesome guys in the SEAL platoon, but they're gonna, they're gonna do their job too, sometimes. And, you know, there's, that's the way it is. And, you know, we, we, that deployment had a lot of visibility on it because it was, because there was a very kinetic deployment. And, um, you know, we also, you know, just from a, from a historical standpoint, you know, Mark Lee was in, was it, was with us and he was the first SEAL killed in Iraq and Mikey Montessor was with us and Mikey, you know, was, was awarded the Medal of Honor posthumously.

• 1:57:12Speaker 00

  And, and so those kind of things sort of definitely drew, drew the spotlight to what had happened and, and that deployment.

• 1:57:19Chris Williamson?

  What was Chris Kyle like in real life?

• 1:57:23Speaker 00

  Just a awesome, funny guy that was a good patient sniper and cared about his job and cared about his family and was a, you know, was, was a good, a damn good sniper that would stay on his gun for a very long time. And, you know, he was also very funny, very gregarious, always doing pranks. Just, just a good, a good guy, like, like we were talking about earlier, the kind of guy you want to go to war with.

• 1:57:55Chris Williamson?

  How did it feel watching that movie?

• 1:58:00Speaker 00

  You know, it's, it's, it's a Hollywood movie and I, I, I kind of went into it with rudimentary understanding that this movie's not going to be some documentary depiction of everything that happened. Yeah, they have to take a guy and take his whole life and take multiple deployments and condense that all down in a very short time period. They gotta take a, a very complex combat situation and bear and, and distill that down into like good guy, bad guy. And, and, and that's what they did.

• 1:58:41Speaker 00

  And, and I, you know, um, also trying to show the, the sacrifices that the families make and how hard it is on the families. That's was probably the most important part of the story. And so it was, you know, I watched it and, and kinda, I, I, as I watched it, I kinda understood those things and, you know, like that was that.

• 1:59:07Chris Williamson?

  To me, the conversation around the family of servicemen and servicewomen families is, is definitely one that 15 years ago, I don't remember thinking about as much. And now is one of the things that's at the front of my mind, that when you have somebody that goes on operation and serves, it's not just them that pay the price. And it's not just them and the support units that are out there and the drivers and the people on the ground and the fixes and the translators and stuff. There's a literal army of people back home as well that have to pay sometimes just as high of a price.

• 1:59:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, in some cases higher. Um, you know, when you, when I'm on deployment, I know what's happening. I know what is going on. I know what the risks are. I know what I can do to mitigate those risks. My, my wife, my kids were too young to understand, but my wife, she knows what the risks are. She, and, well, let me rephrase that. She doesn't know what the risks are. She doesn't know how we're mitigating risks. She doesn't know what it's like on the ground. So.

• 2:00:22Speaker 00

  It's very easy for someone in the family to start, you know, believing the worst things that are happening and every, you know, when you see that there's a casualty and there's two Marines killed in Al Anbar province, or there's four Marines killed in Al Anbar province, and you know that the vast majority of those casualties are taking place in the city of Ramadi, which is where your husband is, that can create some, that can create some, that can create some drama in your head. And that can make that deployment worse for the family at home than it is for the guy that's on deployment.

• 2:00:52Chris Williamson?

  Think about whenever you've got a missing kid, and what is it that the parent or are missing anybody, right? When the family of that person are doing the press tour, trying to appeal the thing that they all say, even if it's been five years, I just want to know. Because the open loop of being uncertain about something is literal torture. And yeah, I can imagine that by not knowing, it's not like you're WhatsApp messaging every couple of hours, "Yeah, good, just got to Ramadi, bit hot here, uh, here's a selfie." Like, that's not, that's not the way that it works.

• 2:01:33Speaker 00

  Nope. So they don't know what's going on. And fear of the unknown is a thing. And so for the families back home, it can be very, very difficult, for sure.

• 2:01:42Chris Williamson?

  Would you ever run for office? Does that call to you?

• 2:01:45Speaker 00

  I certainly hope not.

• 2:01:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, I don't, I don't, I don't want to get involved in politics. And, you know, I don't think, it's just a disgusting sort of life. And, you know, my five friends that are involved in politics, and it just doesn't seem like that, uh, doesn't seem like what I'd want, I'd want to do in my life.

• 2:02:12Chris Williamson?

  What about running a school? Obviously, you've got the stuff that you already do with kids. You have that, that foot in the door. Tim has got his thing up in Austin.

• 2:02:20Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 2:02:21Chris Williamson?

  Does that call to you?

• 2:02:23Speaker 00

  Yeah. And I've, I've got people that are, you know, again, Tim and I talked about this, and Tim's doing an awesome thing with his school, Apogee Cedar Park. So, and look at it, it's outstanding. So with the Warrior Kid thing, I've got some, uh, some irons in the fire on that right now.

• 2:02:41Chris Williamson?

  What would you add into or what would be the uh are there any big differences that you think would be made in a school syllabus? Typical to what you're aware of at the moment if if you were to be the person that was

• 2:02:53Speaker 00

  Oh yeah.

• 2:02:54Chris Williamson?

  In charge?

• 2:02:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, hundred percent, of course. Changes to the civilian school?

• 2:02:59Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:00Speaker 00

  Syllabus?

• 2:03:00Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:00Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:03:01Chris Williamson?

  Like what? What would you change?

• 2:03:02Speaker 00

  Uh, basic survival skills, right? How to start a fire? How to put out a fire? Basic, basic trauma medicine, how you do first aid? Just those kind of things, how you change the tire on a car? Basic plumbing, basic electrical, like some life skills that are very beneficial? Working on engines, those kind of things? And

• 2:03:31Speaker 00

  Those, those are things I would add to the curriculum. Obviously jujitsu would be in the curriculum.

• 2:03:35Chris Williamson?

  I was gonna say, if you were to do that, I would be so interested if, if everybody was, if PE, I don't know what you call it out here.

• 2:03:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, we call it PE.

• 2:03:42Chris Williamson?

  Uh, if PE was um heavily pushed toward learning combat and learning martial arts? I would be fascinated to know what happens to bullying rights in schools.

• 2:03:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:03:54Chris Williamson?

  If everybody knows that everybody can go.

• 2:03:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, there's also, there's a natural pecking order that gets established and it is what it is. The thing is, I've, I've said this, jujitsu will not only help you from get getting bullied, it will also prevent you from becoming a bully. Because when a kid's doing jujitsu, they realize, oh, I'm a little bit bigger and stronger. I can take this person, but there's someone that's bigger and stronger than me and they can take me. And so it, it helps on both, both fronts.

• 2:04:25Chris Williamson?

  What about um working on movies? Obviously, we've had Cowboy Saroni, Gina Carano, they're people that have moved across into the movie industry. Would you be interested in that as a, a writer or maybe even as a? As a person in front of the lens?

• 2:04:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I've I've got some some forward motion on both Warrior Kid right now and on the novel that I wrote called Final Spin. So the both of those are being are moving forward in the in the movie arena.

• 2:04:55Chris Williamson?

  That's pretty cool.

• 2:04:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, and those it's take Warrior Kid, it's taken a while to find the right people, but that's that's moving forward. And same Final Spin took less. I mean, Final Spin only just came out and it was almost immediately was getting requests for a movie adaptation. Warrior Kid was the same thing, but it took a while to find the right people. And it's a project that I didn't want to kind of just haphazardly throw out there to the world. So yeah, both of those are moving forward in the and and they're gonna come.

• 2:05:27Chris Williamson?

  How does that feel as someone who didn't grow up with, I don't know, a desire to be a writer throughout SEALs, throughout Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and surfing and stuff like that. And then you just appear with a fiction novel and now it's being turned into a film. How does that feel? What does that mean to you?

• 2:05:53Speaker 00

  I mean, I have so many stories in my head. That's kind of crazy. That's the one that bubbled to the surface. And there's a bunch more that come up on a daily basis that it's just a matter of which ones I'm gonna take the time to put onto paper. And

• 2:06:11Speaker 00

  you know, I don't know, I don't

• 2:06:15Speaker 00

  I don't think about that kind of stuff too much. I'm stoked, you know, it's very cool. It's cool. I like it. It's it's it's gonna be cool to watch this thing get made. And I'm stoked about it.

• 2:06:30Chris Williamson?

  That is a byproduct. The fact that you don't overthink, you don't think too much about the situation itself, I think is a byproduct of someone that has a lot of forward momentum. I think that when you've just got lots of things that are happening, you By necessity, you just focus on whatever's next in front of you.

• 2:06:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, earlier you were talking about thinking about whether you're going to be successful or not. And oddly enough, I don't really, I don't really think about that. I don't think about, how's this book gonna do? How's this, is it gonna get turned into a movie? I don't think about that. I just kind of go. And so I guess, yes, I agree with you. You're the forward momentum piece. I'm kind of moving forward and people that work with me, they know that I'm like on to the next thing. All right. Hey, cool. That thing's, that thing's got some trajectory. It's going in the right direction. Cool. I'm going to go on to the next thing and, and keep moving forward.

• 2:07:20Chris Williamson?

  I spoke to Huberman a couple of weeks ago and I brought up with him about the fact that he's got tattoos that very few people have, have seen, although there are photos on the internet. It's one of them in an octopus t-shirt looking like this. Have you got any tattoos? I'm thinking that you've got one. What, what is it? What does it mean?

• 2:07:39Speaker 00

  I, I, I got a tattoo when I was a kid, like, you know, I was in the hardcore scene and, and, you know, we all were getting tattoos. And, and so, yeah, I got a tattoo. It's like just a kind of a random design on my back. No real, it's kind of half finished and it's kind of dumb, but.

• 2:07:57Chris Williamson?

  Would you ever finish it off? Or you just?

• 2:07:59Speaker 00

  I don't care.

• 2:07:59Chris Williamson?

  Not bothered? Well, I guess it is literally behind you.

• 2:08:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, it's literally behind me. And I think one of my daughters said, you should get that thing finished. I'm like, yeah, I'm not gonna miss, I'm not gonna miss three days of jujitsu to let a tattoo heal up. So it's not happening.

• 2:08:12Chris Williamson?

  So I know that you're a fan of the Thomas Sowell quote where he says, there's no solutions, only trade offs. And this is something in a roundabout way, that same concept is probably one of the most meaningful things that I've learned this year. What does that quote mean to you? Or how have you, how have you reflected on that?

• 2:08:34Speaker 00

  Well, especially from a leadership perspective, that's kind of where I talked about it for the first time. How the heck did you hear that quote from me? That's, I don't know when I've said that. I guess I did some podcasts about it, but. Yeah, it's it's it's very helpful to people's mindsets, I think. And that's when I when I talked about that, it was primarily to help people see that you're looking for a full on solution to this problem. And there's probably not a full on solution that's going to satisfy every every aspect of this scenario. So what you have to do instead is you have to look for what what's the trade off going to be? I'm going to win a little bit here. I'm going to lose a little bit there, but overall, it's going to move me in the right direction.

• 2:09:15Speaker 00

  I think it's a good thing to understand as opposed to going through life, thinking that you're going to find a 100% solution because it's not going to exist. So you're going to have to make trade offs in life.

• 2:09:26Chris Williamson?

  Douglas Murray came on the show and he was talking about this story from Christopher Hitchens, where Hitch told him that in life, we have to choose our regrets. And what he meant by that was the fact that opportunity cost demands that you're going to have regrets. And I'd always thought that regrets were a bug, not a feature of life. I didn't realize that they were baked into the literal fabric of how we exist. So you could make the perfect decision.

• 2:09:53Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 2:09:54Chris Williamson?

  And still look back and have regrets about not making the other one, simply because of that open loop that we were talking about before.

• 2:09:59Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 2:10:00Chris Williamson?

  You don't know what the other thing could have been. I was like, okay, so well, that's interesting that regrets are a feature, not a bug. But what does it mean that you need to choose them? Okay, well, given the fact that regrets are baked into the fabric of life. When you're making a decision, one of the things that you need to consider is which of these regrets can I live with? And which of these regrets can I not live with?

• 2:10:25Chris Williamson?

  And that there's no solutions, only trade offs thing speaks to the same energy.

• 2:10:32Speaker 00

  Hundred percent. Do you own a house?

• 2:10:33Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 2:10:34Speaker 00

  So when you're, a real estate agent told me this years and years ago. When you're looking at a house, there's gonna be shortfalls. There's gonna be problems with the house that you're looking at. And whether it's gonna be, even if it's the perfect house, well, that means it's gonna cost a ton. So that's the trade off that you're gonna make. And so what you have to do is you have to break down like what you just said. Hey, listen, I wanted a bigger yard, but this one has a huge garage. I'm gonna go with it. You just gotta figure out those trade offs. There's no solutions. You're not gonna get the perfect house until you build one. And even when we build one, guess what? You're gonna look at it when you're done and you're gonna say, I should have moved this wall. 24 inches to the west, right? It's, it'll, it'll eat you up.

• 2:11:20Chris Williamson?

  Talk to me about your approach with the long term plans, because I've heard you mention that real long term plans are something that you don't necessarily optimize for. You seem to optimize a little bit more for optionality and for kind of a medium term thing. What's, what's your thinking around that?

• 2:11:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, I don't know what I'm gonna be doing in five years. People, what, what, what's your five year plan? I have no idea what my five year plan is, because I don't know what opportunities are gonna arise. I don't know what things I'm gonna fail at. I don't know what mistakes I'm gonna make. So where, how am I gonna sit here and tell you where I'm gonna be in five years? I, I can't. And if I did, I'd probably be shutting off some opportunities that are there because I'm too close minded and focused on some five year plan. So I make iterative decisions about things. I move a little bit in some direction. I test, I get the feedback from it. Was it good? Was it bad? Should I put more resources toward it or not? And then as time goes by, I've either moved significantly in that direction or I've realized it's a dead end and I'm gonna move away.

• 2:12:18Speaker 00

  It was, it was more convenient. A year ago, when I'd say five years ago, I didn't have a podcast, I didn't have a book, I didn't have any, I wasn't, didn't have anything, really.

• 2:12:28Speaker 00

  That was five years ago. So my five year plan, if you would, six years ago, my five year plan would have been like, oh, I guess I'll be training jujitsu and I would be training jujitsu and surfing and hanging out with my family.

• 2:12:39Chris Williamson?

  Working with life, probably doing echelon front, but maybe a slightly bit bigger.

• 2:12:43Speaker 00

  Maybe not even.

• 2:12:45Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:45Speaker 00

  I mean, I don't know.

• 2:12:47Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:47Speaker 00

  We, we, we, we didn't jump in and invest some huge amount of money into echelon front. No, we started, hey, does anyone want to learn this stuff? Oh yeah, it looks like they do. Oh yeah, it looks like a lot of people do. Oh, it looks like it's very beneficial to them. Oh, they're telling all their friends at other companies that they should do this stuff so they can get better. And that whole way down the path, yes, we'll spend more time, we'll invest more into it, we'll write a book about it. Cool, that made sense. So that's what, that's what I have to take the, the, the approach with everything. What opportunities are going to knock on my door today? What opportunities have I started that are going to close tomorrow? I don't know. So I don't spend, I don't invest a lot of time and energy trying to predict where I'm going to be in five years. When I don't know.

• 2:13:29Chris Williamson?

  I, I really resonated with that. I really like it because especially in the online productivity world, you know, you should break down the 25 year plan into five year blocks into one year sprints into quarterly goals or whatever. And it's just never resonated with me. It's never resonated, it doesn't appeal to my nature. It doesn't appeal to the way that life is by design unpredictable. And you don't know what skills you're going to acquire, what setbacks or advantages are going to come your way. And that was, you, it was, you're one of the first people I've heard who's really succinctly put it together is look, I don't have, and you're someone that if people were to think Jocko's the kind of guy with the plan, right? You don't go into battle without a plan.

• 2:14:13Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, well, yeah, but the entire war is something that requires us to respond as it occurs.

• 2:14:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, look at the mistakes we've made, well, America has made as a country in war. Why? Cause we had a long-term strategy that didn't make sense. And guess what? No one was willing to say, hey, this long-term strategy we've got is not working. We need to make some adjustments and we need to do it now. Instead, nope. Ignore those numbers. Ignore the, the feedback loop that we're getting. Just press forward with this strategy that we're on, doesn't, doesn't work. So I don't want to have, you have to go into battle with an idea of where you want to get to. And then you, as you start moving in that direction, you've got to say, oh, that wasn't what I thought it was going to be. We need to make some adjustments.

• 2:14:56Chris Williamson?

  That's the, uh, discipline and creativity spectrum coming up again.

• 2:15:01Speaker 00

  It is indeed.

• 2:15:04Chris Williamson?

  Looking from the outside as somebody that's black belt in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, the stuff that you're doing with Origin, bringing manufacturing back to the US, writing books, books being turned into screenplays and movies and stuff like that, and everything else that you do, that from the outside can look like something which is incredibly desirable as a position to get in. One thing that I've learned over the last few years, especially in spending more time around the people that are successful and have accolades and stuff, is that often there's prices that they pay for getting to this stage that they're at, that the people who

• 2:15:47Chris Williamson?

  want to be there wouldn't end up paying. So what I've come to believe is that a lot of the time, people have very, very high bars and challenges that they need to get past. I'm interested in what the price is that you have to pay in order to sort of be Jocko Willink on a daily basis.

• 2:16:13Speaker 00

  Work.

• 2:16:17Speaker 00

  Work, a lot of work.

• 2:16:23Speaker 00

  You know, when you're watching TV, or you're, you know, looking at Instagram, or you're, you know, going out for dinner on a date and you go to a movie, I'm not doing that. I'm reading a book, I'm getting ready for a podcast, I'm writing something, I'm preparing for something, I'm talking to a client, I'm designing something, I'm thinking about a new supplement, like, it's just, it's just kind of all the time. And so, a guy asked me the other day, "Are you working more now than you were when you were in the SEAL Teams?" And the answer is 100%, "Yes, I'm working harder now."

• 2:17:04Speaker 00

  You know, I'm, well, I should say I'm working more, because I'm working more, more time. No weekends.

• 2:17:14Speaker 00

  No weekends, no evenings really. Luckily for me, I like what I do.

• 2:17:19Chris Williamson?

  I was gonna say, so would you even want that? You know, would you want to spend an afternoon on the couch watching Netflix? Is that something after a very long time of driving discipline? Is that a desire that you have any longer?

• 2:17:37Speaker 00

  Sit on the couch and watch Netflix?

• 2:17:39Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:40Speaker 00

  I mean, not, not, that's not, that's not super, I'm not super stoked on that.

• 2:17:44Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's my point.

• 2:17:46Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:17:46Chris Williamson?

  You've managed to align what you want and what you want to want, then now sitting on top of each other, right?

• 2:17:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I also don't do a lot of what I don't want to do. And my partner at Echelon Front, Leif Babin, pointed this out to me like a year ago. He just said, he said, you know, you've, oh, you're really good. He was doing some stuff that he didn't want to be doing. And, you know, whether it was administrative stuff and, you know, he said, you know, I've got to do this and I've got to do this. I said, why are you doing that?

• 2:18:19Speaker 00

  And he said, well, what do you mean? I said, get someone else to do that. And then, you know, a week later, he's talking, he goes, you know, I was thinking about what you said. You're really good at not doing what you don't want to do. And I am good at doing, I am good at not doing what I don't want to do. I mean, administrative stuff, stuff like that, I don't do any of it. I don't do any of it. Do I have an accountant? Does an accountant cost me a lot of money? Yes, they do. Do I worry about it? Nope, not in the single bit, not in the slightest way. Don't worry about it at all. And I don't have to deal with it. And my taxes are getting done, you know, that's a lot, that's a crazy amount of work and effort. I don't do any of it.

• 2:18:58Speaker 00

  Logistics for my online store, do I do that? I don't do any of that. I don't do any of that. I don't touch that stuff. So all the stuff that, I get to do what I like to do.

• 2:19:11Speaker 00

  The weird thing is, it is a lot. And, and, and mo- it's, it's gonna be, it's, it's challenging for people to do. It's challenging for people to do. It's challenging. It's challenging. You know, uh, you know, my wife, she's like, you know, I said, well, that's not. I, I said, you know, she'll say like, well, what about, what about this? And I'm like, oh, I'm not gonna do that. And she says, you're not normal. You know, and I said, okay, fair enough. She doesn't think I'm, she doesn't think I'm normal. And I think she's probably right.

• 2:19:43Chris Williamson?

  I fear she may be right as well. Yeah. I, so what's the principle there that, that people can take away? Is it to try and outsource the things that you don't want to do? Especially, let's say that it's someone that's growing a business or that is, um, beginning to get themselves to the stage where they have the resources to be able to do this. As quickly as possible. Give away the things that you don't like to do to people who can do them?

• 2:20:09Speaker 00

  Yeah. And, and there's, there's certain things that only you can do.

• 2:20:12Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 2:20:13Speaker 00

  Do you do those things?

• 2:20:13Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 2:20:14Speaker 00

  And let other people do things that other people can do. And, and, and look, I'm, I'm also, you know, if you want to get straight business. Business tactical, I tell people all the time, you know, you, you keep things small and you let the demand signal increase and you grow as the demand signal increases. And.

• 2:20:34Chris Williamson?

  As opposed to what?

• 2:20:35Speaker 00

  I'm not, I, I don't jump in and say, oh, I don't like doing paperwork and I've got a business that I've had for three months. And so I'm gonna hire someone as a, as a CFO to run my accounting right now. No, I'm doing that stuff. I'm doing that stuff until we have enough income to comfortably say, yeah, we can get someone else to do this now. And I can then focus on what I'm good at. So I've done that with all my businesses. Start small and grow as the demand signal is there, grow. And, and you know, I've done things that were, didn't, didn't work. And luckily I didn't invest a bunch of time and effort into them because, hey, I'm, I'm gonna be wrong a lot. And so just because I think something is cool, doesn't mean other people are gonna think it's cool.

• 2:21:19Speaker 00

  I happen to like some random thing and some people might not, or a lot of people might not like it. So I'm not gonna overly invest in something that I, that. People might not want at all.

• 2:21:31Chris Williamson?

  Thinking about the stuff that you can afford to outsource and the things that you can't. I think a good heuristic is what you've just said there. So what are the things that only you can do? Only you can do your podcast.

• 2:21:41Speaker 00

  Only I can do my podcast.

• 2:21:42Chris Williamson?

  Precisely. Only you can write your books, et cetera. Another one that I learned the other day from Leila Hormozzi is a lot of the time, let's say that someone's got a company, a sales company selling software or IT or whatever. One of the first people that they'll bring on is a salesperson and then they'll begin to do operations. And she said, well, hang on, that's the thing that brings the money in. That's the thing that gives fuel to the engine, which you're hoping will drive everything else. So I do think that there's another element that I learned from her, which is do not outsource the thing that drives the revenue. The thing that drives the revenue must be protected at all costs. And if that thing is you and another element that links back to what you just said there.

• 2:22:26Chris Williamson?

  If that thing is your motivation, how can we protect the motivation? Well, my motivation is waning to do the thing, to write the book, to do the podcast, to give the speeches, whatever. Because of the amount of administration, okay, let's lean into that even more. There's, that's the point of highest leverage for us.

• 2:22:45Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 2:22:46Chris Williamson?

  Get that blockage out of the way.

• 2:22:47Speaker 00

  Yep. Yeah. And I have all kinds of people that do all the stuff that I'm either A, not good at, or B, don't want to do, which is beautiful, you know? It's a beautiful thing. It's decentralized command. It's the fourth law of combat leadership. You know, like, hey, how, what's going on in? We have five factories right now at Origin USA, right?

• 2:23:11Chris Williamson?

  Where are they?

• 2:23:12Speaker 00

  Three in Maine, two in North Carolina. So that's an incredible amount of logistics and, and, I mean, just leadership that's going on inside those. And. The technical aspect of weaving cloth and sewing and setting up lines for production. That's incredible amount of work and effort and knowledge that I don't have any expertise in whatsoever. Guess what? I have a team that does. I have people that are awesome. And so that's what's going on. Echelon Front, we have scores of clients. And they need help in leadership. I can't teach them all. Guess what? I have a whole team of people that has their own experiences and they're out there every single day

• 2:23:56Speaker 00

  teaching clients the leadership lessons that we know. Jocko Fuel, the same thing. You were asking me earlier, like what goes into making these things? Oh, am I giving strategic guidance about what I want? A hundred percent. Am I taste sampling, which by the way, there's a good example of something that didn't work? You know, the first, we made an energy drink. The first version of the energy drink was based on my taste buds. Well, my taste buds, since I don't drink a lot of sweets, the first version that we made was not very sweet at all. To me, it tasted like maple syrup practically. But we, I had to open my mind and get feedback and people were like, no, actually this doesn't taste good. Okay, well then let's change it. We just changed, we just changed every single flavor, starting now.

• 2:24:41Speaker 00

  But that took, that took trial and error of me saying, wait a second, I love the way this tastes. But seven out of 10 people would think, yeah, it's okay. Three out of 10 people would say this doesn't taste good at all. That's, that's not, that's not a success. You've got to have 10 out of 10 people say, this freaking tastes delicious. And look, you've got different flavors and maybe nine out of 10 love all the flavors and there's one that, oh, they don't like this one. But I've got to take that feedback and, and adjust to what I'm hearing. But that's an example of, hey, we went down this road of this certain flavor and a flavor system that was based on my taste. Which is why I, I, I know that I have to open my mind and take other opinions and listen to what other people have to say.

• 2:25:26Speaker 00

  And now we've got tastes that are delicious and universally delicious. And so now we can kind of go hard in getting it out there because before there's a risk of, hey, if, how many times are you going to get someone to try a drink? One time, if it tastes like junk, they're not getting it again. So now we've got tastes that are delicious and now people, yep, try it. Now we're, now we can win on taste, which is awesome. We're already winning on efficacy and, and health. But you gotta, you gotta win on all fronts. So now we can win on taste too.

• 2:25:59Chris Williamson?

  What's coming up next? What have you got for the rest of the year that's coming up that you're excited about or interested in?

• 2:26:05Speaker 00

  Probably one of the biggest things is we've got a, a hunt line coming out from Origin. So we're making a, a full line of hunting clothing, hunting apparel from the base layer all the way out to the outer jacket. So that's been a huge undertaking and it's very aggressive. It was very aggressive.

• 2:26:30Chris Williamson?

  What do you mean?

• 2:26:31Speaker 00

  Trying to get that done in a short period of time was very aggressive. And the reason we're able to do it is because everything's in America. The reason we're able to do is because we're able to literally make a, make a design change and have it 15 minutes later for testing. You can't do that when you're working with an overseas company. It's, it's impossible. It's at a minimum, if you're flying it, it's going to take three, four days, four or five days to get back. It's got to get in line. You don't control the line. It's, it's a travesty. But we were able to, because we're all manufactured here and the material that we're using is from here. So we don't even have to wait for some material to ship from overseas. Everything is a hundred percent American made.

• 2:27:11Speaker 00

  So that was a huge undertaking. We're starting to get to that point where I think I'm getting my first, set of the kit here in another week and then it'll be going into production. So that's pretty cool.

• 2:27:27Speaker 00

  You know, we have a, an online training academy. So the, the leadership thing, again, you know, we talked about leadership being a skill.

• 2:27:35Speaker 00

  Just like you can't go to the gym in one time and get in shape, or you can't train jujitsu one time and now you can defend yourself, or you can't pick up a guitar one time. It's the same thing with leadership. You can't just sit through one seminar or read one book and go, "Okay, cool, I've got it." I mean, imagine if you picked up a book on guitar and you read it and now you thought you were going to be able to play guitar. Or you read a book about basketball and now, look, you would get the concepts down, you would understand what you're going to be working toward, but it's a legitimate skill that you have to employ in scenarios to get better at. And so, in order to, in order to make that happen, and it was again, a little bit of a blessing from COVID, we had created an online platform for a client that had 157,000

• 2:28:20Speaker 00

  employees worldwide, and they wanted us to train all their employees. And so, I said, "Hold on a minute," because that would have basically been the dedication of the entire team at Echelon Front to make that happen, traveling. And so, we had created before COVID, we created an online training platform. And then, as that, as COVID hit, we immediately said, "Okay, looks like we're doing this stuff virtually." And what was beautiful was the entire world was, was made to do virtual interaction, whether it was talking. I knew in Easter, I had, whatever, Easter dinner with my parents via Skype call or Zoom call or whatever. And I said,

• 2:29:04Speaker 00

  "Yep, this is, this is the norm now. Everyone's going to understand the capability, the, the benefits of being able to utilize video interaction." Because before that, before COVID, it was, it was rare. I mean, how many video calls did you do before COVID?

• 2:29:20Chris Williamson?

  Apart from for the podcast, it was my input from that. Up until COVID, video podcasting was seen as a second-rate thing to do. Don't get me wrong, I would much rather sit down, but especially as a fledgling creator coming up and didn't have Joe Rogan money, right? So, I couldn't have a nice studio or fly guests out or do whatever. So, for me, that was how I was competing. Then, everybody had to do it. You, you want to keep your show going? You want to keep publishing?

• 2:29:52Chris Williamson?

  Completely flatten the field.

• 2:29:54Speaker 00

  Right.

• 2:29:54Chris Williamson?

  Which meant that what are we competing on now? Oh, we're competing on the quality of the conversation. We're not competing on how fancy the studio is.

• 2:30:01Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 2:30:02Chris Williamson?

  Well, that's interesting.

• 2:30:03Speaker 00

  And so as that happened to you and as it happened to every family in America that suddenly realized they were going to utilize and they understood the technology now because there's a technology barrier. So now at Echelon Front, we said, okay, great. Now we can, now we can train people on a much more regular basis. We can offer them. So, so we made extremeownership.com, which is an online training platform for leadership and for life. Because if you're

• 2:30:25Chris Williamson?

  So that's not just for corporate, that's also people can go do that themselves?

• 2:30:28Speaker 00

  It's individuals and it's individuals. This is the thing that, you know, part of the thing that people,

• 2:30:35Speaker 00

  people need to understand is if you're a human and you interact with other human beings, you're in a leadership position. It doesn't matter if you're the, if you're a frontline worker and you're not in charge of any other people. But guess what? You're interacting with your peers. You're interacting and you have to lead your boss. You have to be able to lead your boss. Your boss doesn't know what's happening in the field. Your boss doesn't know what time that concrete should be poured. Your boss doesn't know what, what time those, those, that those forms need to be set up by, doesn't know that. You have to lead your boss in that right direction. You have to lead your peers in the right direction. You have to lead your family in the right direction. You have to, even if you're, you, you, by leading your family, that means putting your ego in check and listening to what your kids have to say. So there's, everybody's a leader.

• 2:31:20Speaker 00

  And once people understand that, there's so much they can get out of actually learning leadership skills. So that's been, that's been pretty cool on the Echelon Front side. So that's the origin side. That's the Echelon Front side, the Jocko Fuel side. Again, we rearranged these flavors. We've, so that's been huge. And, and the rest of the supplement line is just, it's just making high quality stuff and not cutting corners. And we're, we're, look, in the beginning, when you're doing that, it's hard, right? Because you think Well, wouldn't it be just easier if we did this? Wouldn't it be, couldn't we just cut this? Couldn't we use a little less of this? This, uh, protein that's more expensive?

• 2:32:04Chris Williamson?

  This expensive type of sweetener or whatever.

• 2:32:06Speaker 00

  Right, and, and so you wanna make those cuts early on? And? We didn't. And, and look, quite frankly, when my name is on the freaking label, I, I can't, I can't just cut corners. But now, people recognize that. They recognize that when they buy something from Jocko Fuel, it's as good as, it's as good as you can get. It's the best quality stuff that you can get. So, that's starting to, starting to take hold. And so, that's been, that's been great to see as well.

• 2:32:36Chris Williamson?

  Jocko Welling, ladies and gentlemen. If people want to keep up to date with the stuff that you're doing, where should they go?

• 2:32:41Speaker 00

  jocko.com.

• 2:32:43Chris Williamson?

  Jocko, I appreciate you. Thank you.

• 2:32:44Speaker 00

  Thanks, man. Appreciate it.