#949 - Jocko Willink - How To Build Unstoppable Confidence

23:41Yep. And you have to climb up the targona and then you have to go over the top of it and then climb back down the other side. But even that, if you're freaked out or you're scared, you're going to get stuck there. And there's guys that do get stuck. They don't climb over the top of it. Not a lot, but there's occasionally guys that they out this, they're not, it's not happening. So the longer that you sit, you do hang on and look and stare and contemplate the chances of you falling off. It doesn't get any better. So eventually you just throw your leg over and get over that damn thing. So I think I probably just experienced it enough and was cognizant enough to recognize that at some point, oh yeah, this feeling of caution and fear and all that stuff in the back of my head, yeah, I just need to give it all that and just go.

24:27It seems to go away when I move toward it. Yeah, it does go away. It 100 % goes away. There's gotta be something that you do that makes you a little bit scared. What? What's the stuff? Going out on stage is one of those, you know, three and a half thousand people in London, this big event that we've been building up to for six months. And my least, my two favorite bits of it, three favorite bits of it, half an hour before I'm about to go on, as I go on, and then just as I finish and as I come off. One minute before I go on, it's fucking awful. And it's the, in the Humvee driving to the target with the people thinking about the things, you know, but you see a greyhounds in the traps before they get set off.

25:15It's the exact same. And that's a really, really good way to put it, the fact that the fear of the thing is only present when the thing hasn't started. I wrote a kid's book called Mikey in the Dragons and the story is spoiler alert. the kid, his dad is the king, his dad dies. The kid now has to defend the village from the dragons. And he's scared because he's only a little kid and he can't pick up the sword and he can't pick up the shield, it's too heavy. But he's the kid, he's the son of the king, he's the prince, he gotta go fight the dragons and he gets a note from his dad that says, hey, stand up, go attack the dragons.

25:57You'll see that there's nothing to be afraid of. And he gets up there and enters the dragon cave and guess what, the dragons are little tiny cute dragons. And, but his fear is the same fear that we all build up for whatever that thing is, whether it's going on stage or whether it's jumping out of an airplane or whether it's taking risk with some kind of a business situation. Well, the more you sit there and think about it, the worse it's gonna get in your own head. So good. I wonder how much of it as well is fear of the unknown versus fear of the thing. It's the story that I've told myself, It's the fact that there's uncertainty on the other side of this and that I like control that here is order and there is chaos and I don't want to lose some of this beautiful order by stepping into the chaos But as you do you realize that it's not that you that that merges with you is that you push this out of the way You know kind of like how a Little reality distortions fear moves through and you locally it so this is it was my Twitter bio for ages to quote from Navale He says, I locally reverse entropy.

26:59I fucking love that idea. You know, you've got this entire universe entropy, this force that is going to destroy everything. The only thing that is not going to survive, or that is going to survive, entropy, right? This permanent decline all the way down. And you think, yeah, briefly, for my time on this planet, for however many decades I'm gonna be here, I actually locally reverse entropy. The fucking entire power of the universe, bearing down on me. It's like, yeah, not while I'm here. I really love that. I think it's a cool cosmic metal finger. Yeah, and it's just the fact that you can control a lot more than you think.

27:36And the world is happening, and if you let the world happen to you, it's going to happen to you. But if you want to make something happen in the world, you can do that as well. So choice you get to make. Does being in firefights and driving in Humvees up to scary missions Does that make everything else seem less fear -inducing? Well, I'm trying to work out how much carryover you get from a career of doing what you do to now. Is it permanently reset a baseline of that? Yeah, it kind of is, man. Like, what is the worst case scenario that's going to happen? And really the, when the fear that I had in combat, which was a deep, horrible one that you feel in your stomach, knots is you fear that one of you guys is gonna get wounded or killed.

28:37And fear of me getting killed, I didn't really care. I was over that, I accepted it. That's what could happen. and that's like my job and not just my job. Like, oh, this is what I signed up for. But that's kind of what I always felt like. That was just who I was. But I'm okay with taking that responsibility for myself, but you know, putting that responsibility on your friends is not something that feels good. And so that gut -wrenching horrible feeling is not something that I don't think you're an experienced that in a normal job and even with businesses. And I've, look, I've had things go wrong in my businesses.

29:18We've had made mistakes that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. And I've had my team saying, like, reporting to me and telling me about this negative thing that happened. And I could see, you know, because I got great people that they're really disappointed and they really feel terrible, but I'm like, hey, no one's gonna die. And we're gonna recover from this and everything's gonna be cool. Like, where it's all right. Rogan's got this insight. The worst thing that's ever happened to you is the worst thing that's ever happened to you. Absolutely true. And if the worst thing that's ever happened to you is a fucking firefight infillusion.

30:01Or if the worst thing that's ever happened to you is accidentally spending 10 grand on the wrong business credit card. Both of those say you don't get there's no uber search charge discount or whatever for the worst thing that ever happened to you being less bad than the worst thing that ever happened to somebody else. And where I really learned that was with kids because as kids are in sixth grade and someone you know throws a rotten orange at them and everyone laughs at them, that is horrible for that kid. And when the kid comes home and they're crying and they say, and you go, what happened?

30:38They do that, I got it. Hit in the head and they called me orange head. And you go, I don't worry about it, it's funny. That doesn't work. You have to learn to, you have to learn to, to deal with them as if they've just been into firefight. Exactly, exactly. And you can help them get through it. You know, you can help them because it helps it will help them when they see that perspective as well Just like when I was talking to my team. It's like, oh, we had this horrible thing happen It's the worst thing that's ever happened to the team collectively. Okay Me sharing the perspective of like hey guys No one's dead.

31:11We're gonna be okay. We're gonna, you know, no one's getting their bonus this quarter, but Okay, me included, but that's all right. We're gonna get through this and we're gonna grow and we learn from it and we're gonna carry on. So giving people perspective can help them, but you can't just say, oh, your problem isn't really a problem. You can't say that, that doesn't work. Yeah, denying, saying to somebody, the way that you feel isn't valid is not a constructive way. It's not gonna work out well. It's not gonna work out. No, with your partner that comes home and says, you said that you're gonna do this thing, it's like, no, I didn't.

31:46It's like, well, in their world, you said that they did, and even the denial of that, it's like, look, I, uh, how about I go and do it anyway, even though there's just a million different ways of communicating like that. I want to know, just on the five -fight topic, um, I've been spending a good bit of time reading more, um, like military history and, and trying to get a bit more of an understanding of, there's a, a great book called, atrocity, which is the hundred greatest human atrocities across time, drank by the number of people that were killed. They've been sort of trying to think about that level of fear, that level of sort of kinetic engagement between people.

32:31What is it that normal people don't understand about what a modern firefight is like? What is it that they don't get about what it actually like to be that? I think the chaos of it and the not knowing what's so here's an example we we would in training when I was running training we would have guys shoot paintball at like really high speed paintball guns and so if you you're a seal -potoon commander you're a seal -potoon commander Chris and I would have my seals in the training detachment going out with paintball and shooting your guys and you had paintball tune you could shoot back. So I remember guys would come to me and they'd say, well, you know, we'd be in an urban environment, right?

33:19So like a fake city that we have. It's concrete buildings, but it's a fake city. And the platoon commander, Chris comes back to me and he's like, hey, jockele, this is not realistic. Why isn't realistic? Well, we can't tell where your guys are shooting from because the paintball, the paint guns don't have muzzle flash and they don't make a bang. So we can't tell where the shots are coming from. And it's like, guess what? You're not going to know where you're getting shot at from. I mean, it's very similar to a paintball. Actually, it's like, you've ever been in a city and you hear a siren over your left shoulder and you start looking over your left shoulder and all of a sudden it comes from the right because of the way sound dynamics work.

33:58So that's like one tiny example of how confusing and chaotic it can be. And so I think seeing in the movies, some they're doing it better and better now. The movie just came out called Warfare, which was directed and written by a seal guy named Ray Mendoza, who actually was the group of guys that came and took my place, and my guys placed in Romani in 2006. he came and took his guys took our place. And so a few weeks later they had a they they got hit on an operation and they had two guys get really badly wounded. Um, but it was a really and a couple of their Iraqi soldiers that from the Iraqi soldiers got killed.

34:45There's a very vicious situation. But when you see the movie and they he made it very realistic. And it's chaos. It's chaos and confusion and guys are not know what's happening, screaming, wounded guys just screaming. And so I think that level of chaos and confusion is what gets missed out on. And then what the leader needs to do is take a step back from that chaos and confusion, figure out what's happening and make decisions. So yeah, that's it. It's not as slick or sexy as it's been portrayed in movies traditionally, but people are now catching up. Yeah, I think people are catching up now. I think people, I think, and this movie warfare is a great example of, oh, there's total chaos.

35:36It's not neat. Yeah, it's not neat. And by the way, human beings with an incredible amount of training are still gonna like do things that you don't expect them to do. And that's real. So it's a good, it's, Holly Wood is starting to catch up with that. I'm trying to think back of, you know, saving private Ryan did a pretty good job. You know, that opening scene on the beach, there was definitely World War II veterans that sat through that, D -Day veterans, that sat through that and said, well, like that, you guys got it. And some of the effects that they did, even in saving private, in saving private Ryan, where Tom Hanks is, they're getting shot at, and he's sort of like, it gets quiet and slow motion type stuff, and he's just kind of detached from the whole thing.

36:26He's just out of body experience. And then someone shakes him, hey, you know, Captain, you gotta get, and he kind of gets back in it. And that's kind of a leading indicator of what they're starting to get better and better at. Is that a common emotion to feel? That, yeah, like, and even earlier we were talking about, like noise and when you're shooting your gun in a gunfight shooting your gun is freaking loud. But you're shooting your gun in a gunfight. You don't you don't go out that's loud. Now you might start to catch a glimpse of that sometimes where you're like, oh my machine gunner's right here and he's dumping rounds and you go that's really loud right now.

37:10We're getting hit with blank by the way which hurts. So there's just these things that are happening that there's a lot going on. And yeah, sometimes you're adrenaline's going and you start to slow down and see things moving in a slower manner, time kind of slows down sometimes. You start hearing some things that you might not have heard or not hearing things that you would hear. You know, another big thing is, you know, in modern days we have these radios and we have headphones with noise canceling headphones. and guys would start to pass radio traffic on the radio. So if I needed you, hey, Chris, come down to the first floor of this building.

37:50I need you to set security for me. And I would say that on the radio to you. Hey, Chris, you know, hey, Chris, come down to the first floor. I need you to say, meanwhile, you're up there on your machine gun. You don't hear a damn word that I say. And so what I have to do is I have to pass word verbally, like, Chris and Chris, Chris, it wakes you up because everything that's going on the headphone just because you got a patent interrupt. Yes. Yes. So it's just background. It's ambient fucking lift music. Yes. That's crazy. Yeah. I mean, what about dealing with the level of adrenaline, sort of during and after?

38:24Because you know, you hear about, I was talking to a friend, and the brown belt and BJJ, but fought in my type for a long time, went out to Thailand to fight. And we were watching Chris Ubank, junior versus Connor Ben, boxing fight that happened the other a week in the UK, probably one of the biggest, you know, the two sons of two very famous boxes who had a huge rivalry and now they're doing it. It's sort of been build up and all this stuff. It was super epic. I mean, and it was one of those walkouts that takes five minutes to happen. And there's a dance bit and both of the dads are with the sons.

38:56So it was, you know, it was real sort of hairs on the back of your neck stuff. But I asked Josh, hey man, do you want to be first or do you want to be second in terms of walk out? So well, typically the champion will come out second. But I was like, yeah, I get that. I've always seen that, but which ones do you want to be? Do you want to get into the ring and sort of get a sense of the space? Or do you want to come out second? And he was like, dude, you always want to be second. Because you're stood in the ring, the adrenaline's already been at its peak, and you're just getting cold, slow. The adrenaline's not there.

39:27You've already had your moment. Now you're watching this. Dick had had his moment. So I wondered the same when it comes to how long can you sustain adrenaline fall through a combat mission and what happens when you got, we have a five minutes where we regroup at one corner and then you're like, okay, fuck, I've got a real, here we go, we go back up again. It is like a roller coaster, but what you were just saying and what we talked about previously, walk out second, because then the guy that walked out first gets to spend an extra four and a half minutes contemplating what's about to happen and living in his own fear, right?

40:04He's running through that fear loop and freaking out, whereas you haven't even walked out yet. So let him sit out there on the big stage and let him freak out about it. I'm sure that they take that time as well. It's like, you'll walk out five minutes. I'm like, oh, we're gonna start, you know, 90 seconds late. It's like Musashi showing up four hours or three hours late to a sword fight. Like, oh yeah, you and I are gonna fight cool. I'll be there at noon. Show up at two or three. Yeah, do you just sit there and freak out? So it's a good plan. But yeah, adrenaline, that up and down, if that adrenaline, how did you manage that?

40:32Well, what's interesting about that is you would think, like if I said to you, all right Chris, you're going to go on a patrol right now and someone, there's gonna be enemy trying to kill you. You'd think to yourself, like, okay, well, I'm gonna be freaking locked on for this whole two hours, right? Like I'm gonna be three hours, I'm gonna be totally locked on. Well, after an hour and a half and nothing's happened yet and you're hot and you're tired and you're sweaty and you're carrying a hundred pounds worth of 60 pounds worth of gear, You start to go, dude, do I really want to take a knee at this corner?

41:05Do I really need to take a knee at this corner right now? Meaning you're going to stop and you'd like to lower your profile a little bit, but after an hour and a half, maybe you'll just stand and hold that thing. So it's interesting, we talk about complacency and how you can't get complacent, right? Well, and people say, well, you know, in combat, of course, you'd never get complacent. No, absolutely. People get complacent in combat. So when that adrenaline runs out, you have to have the discipline to say, oh, I'm getting my corner. I need to take a knee to lower my profile, period into story.

41:37I gotta, I gotta follow the protocols no matter what. Does that suggest that different roles within military units, different people are disposed to different roles. I mean, this is obvious that certain people go toward spotting, sniping, being the door kickers, being the people that sit back and do more planning, people that drive the fly drones, all the medics, all the rest, whatever it might be. But I have to imagine that within that, you may find when somebody gets into operations that actually I'm perfectly competent to all of the skills, but my nervous system just does not agree with this.

42:17So I'm going to have to adapt over time. and maybe I do need to be somebody that's sat up top and needs to hold sustained focus at a sort of a lower rate for a longer period of time. Or maybe I'm the sort of person I can't hold it. I'm good in bursts. I'm like the Usain Bolt of the fucking special forces. I can kick a door down, do a thing. And then, all right, we're going again. I imagine that that must be something that happens during training and during operations too. Yeah, and you're gonna find like you mentioned being a sniper. Being a sniper is a job of patience. And so if you're a person that's freaking hyperactive and you don't like to sit still for a long time, being a sniper is gonna be a horrible job for you.

42:58Whereas being a preacher, we're gonna walk up to a door, someone's gonna say, breach it up and you're gonna go kick that thing in or blow it up in the next 14 seconds. That's a job for short attention span Chris. But if long attention span Chris, patient Chris will guide you as a seal to be a sniper, as opposed. And then also like you've got joint tactical air control, which is the guy that's got multiple aircraft overhead. And he's got stuff going on on the ground, but he's got to take, he's got to detach from that, and he's got to put these aircraft, he's got to stack them in the proper way, keep them out of each other's way in the air, and then he's got to find targets on the ground and direct various aircraft.

43:39So there's a lot of cerebral processing that has to happen. So depending on who you are, you're gonna sort of get guided to a job that is suitable for you. Yeah, so I've been thinking about this after a cool genetic testing that I did that looks at all of the different alleles that you've got and then maps them to what they're predictive for. So some of them are to do with dopamine response, others are to do with how you process vitamin B12, some of them for me to do with how you process as cortisol and adrenaline. And one of the jobs that it said would not be good for me would be something with huge peaks and troughs.

44:19So as long as I can sustain focus, I could be someone that was holding it for a long period of time. But if you've got these massively intense periods and then these big dips, my nervous system isn't built to come back into land very quickly like that. I would love, I knew that we had this episode. I'd love to see what your results would be with that. My ability to clear adrenaline, cortisol, all not so good. I have to guess that you and the rest of the guys that you were with would be, uh, whatever the equivalent of like a, a super, a super spread or event for being able to bring that back into land, fascinating.

44:53And there's no genetic test on that thing to get in the seal teams. So we end up with guys and you can see them. Like you can see a guy that gets really, uh, I don't know if this is the same thing, but you have people like get really emotional while things. And then some people that don't and everything in between. So I think some of that has to, I mean, certainly I would think that if you're a generalist pumping, your emotions are heightened, right? And then if you're a generalist and it's not pumping, then you're more emotionally calm. I would think that that would be accurate. So you get you end up with both people in the sealed teams.

45:27And yeah, like someone that's super hyper emotional is probably not going to be ideal sniper, not that they're not because there are guys that are emotional that are great snipers too. But, you know, if you've got someone that, as you grow, right, as you get older, you must learn to regulate some of that stuff too. I'm assuming so that you are harder to disrupt. Knock off base. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I mean, that's the fascinating thing that you realize when you see the building blocks of who you are, which are, you know, this 20 ,000 pairs of alleles or whatever it might be. And I was like, ah, I always wondered why fucking like gluten didn't agree with me.

46:09Ah, I always wondered why I struggled to sleep after something exciting happened on a night timer. Ah, I always wondered why, you know, whatever. I would like to run another experiment where we like you give me, I give you this test and then I just make stuff up and tell you because I hear about people who do like whoops strap and they get told in the morning you didn't get good sleep last night. And then they start feeling like, oh man, I'm really dragging today. And then they get told, oh, you slept great last night and they feel like they have more energy. And pretty soon they go, wait a second.

46:46I told I didn't sleep well, but I had an awesome day and I did, you know, I performed well in my stuff. So I'd be interested to tell you like, oh, you're emotionally just locked on and see you. if you were like, oh yeah, boy. There's a great book called The Expectation Effect by David Rubson, just popular science book, it's about four years old now. And he looked at a study where they did exactly this. So they gave cohort of people two different groups. One group has a particular genetic predisposition that allows them to blow off CO2 more efficiently. And that means that for the O2 max work, they have the much more effective.

47:25other group does not have this mutation. They mixed them up and split them into two parts. So each group had equal proportions of people with and people without you can see where I'm going to go. They told group one, hey, you've got this genetic mutation. Remembering 50 % of them don't, you're gonna crush this is gonna be amazing. Group two, you don't have this genetic mutation. It may be a little bit more tough for you to do. Remembering 50 % of them do, the group that were told that they did but didn't have it outperformed the group that did have it, but we told that they didn't. And he came up with this synopsis, which is your expectations are even more powerful than your genes.

47:58Have you ever heard of the monster experiment? No. So it's the exact same thing, except for it was with kids, with speech impediments. So what they did is they said, hey, Chris, listen, you know how occasionally when you're talking, you kind of like stutter a little bit, and of course everyone stutters a little bit sometimes. So I say, Chris, that's because you're a stutterer, and it's probably gonna get worse as you get older. and sure enough, when they told kids that, they developed stutters and had it get worse. And then other kids, they said, oh yeah, you've got the kids with actual stutters, they say, hey, you got a little bit of a stutter right now, but it's no factor, it's just you're going through the face.

48:35And they would come out of it. And this turned into a big giant loss, because it gave kids like permanent speech impediments, which is just awful. Yeah, hence they call it monster. Which is interesting because there's also that thing, which I have heard and read, which is when a kid does something good, you don't compliment them on their talent. You compliment them on their hard work. Yeah, yeah. Which this is a little bit of the opposite, right? If I say, you know, Chris, you did a great job because you're so talented, then you're like, oh cool, I don't have to work that hard. But there's a little bit of the opposite, right?

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50:29Um, I don't know. I think it was pretty simple to understand. I agree, but I, it's with simplicity comes an awful lot of opportunity for people to, Yeah, I guess there's always people that you know as they're trying to fish for a contrarian thing to say, which I think you kind of have to fish for it. I think you have to work for it to get with that statement. But oh, there's such a thing as too much discipline. And if you have too so much discipline in your life, then you won't be enjoying your life. And cool. Yep. If you are so disciplined that you never go out and you never eat a pizza, Cool, that might be bummed out.

51:14Yep, you can go too far with it. But generally speaking, if you have an occasional pizza because they taste really good and want some month or whatever, you go down to the pizza place and you get a pizza, cool, good for you, that's gonna be awesome. That's the reward for freedom. But I think it's pretty straightforward. And I guess if I was to fish a little bit more, I would say that the idea that discipline is natural or it's innate. Inate. And actually my middle daughter, who's a Jiu -Jitsu player, she was actually speaking the other day. And one of the things that she said was she was speaking about discipline.

52:01And she said, you know, I was training, my dad and I went to the gym the other day and we were both training and I was training with, you know, the guys that I trained with and she was training with the people she trained with. And it's a Sunday and we're training and we're both like really tired when we're done. And we get done and we're kind of sitting up on the mats and we're talking and I look at it and I said, I was, I said, not one part of me wanted to come training today. Like 0 % of me wanted to come training today and I'm so glad I came to training. And because you always feel great when you get done training.

52:33But so my daughter went and spoke to this group and she said, my dad, Mr. Discipline, who's been on this path for however many decades, my dad didn't want to train. And he had to go, hey, it doesn't matter whether you want to do or not, you got to have the discipline go do it. And he did and he got done with it. So, and I think that's a good thing to remember that discipline isn't just, oh, this person is, quote, more disciplined than this other person. It's like, no, this person is choosing discipline, this person is not. That's the way it is. So, I think that's an important thing to remember.

53:10You have the option of being disciplined. You don't have the option of being born six four, right? You don't have that option. You either are or you're not. But you do have the option of choosing discipline or not. So, discipline, not necessarily something that you're born with? I don't think so at all. I think maybe there's some small percentage of it. Maybe this person's a little bit more innately disciplined than this other person, but... I think it's a choice. Well, how much of its habit as well? I'm momentum, you know, as you said, that I think this is one of the vicious cycles that people get into.

53:46And it's also why you see people that have unbelievably outsized results in life. And those who kind of have consistently bad results in life, because each positive experience is self -reinforcing. It tells you a story about the sort of person you are and you start to build on good habits and these good habits show you more good habits and you get a little bit more confidence and you get a little bit more. And you say, well, this part of my identity now actually can push myself a little bit so, and you're like, holy fuck, like in it, the 1 % per day increase and you end up at some unbelievably be big number by the end of the year, but you also see the opposite.

54:23And this is how you get, you know, very diverging outcomes from people that started at relatively similar places. Certainly. And this is something that I've said for a while and is discipline, it gets discipline, right? If you make a bad decision in the morning and you decide you're not going to get out of bed, you decide you're not going to work out when you get to the office that don't answer that much more tempting and you're probably going to eat one. Whereas Because if you woke up early, you worked out, you got a little bit of work done before you even showed up to work. You showed up to work.

54:52And now there's donuts, you're like, I don't need those right now. You just make better decisions. And that's... You won the front foot today or on the back foot. Yeah, exactly. And yeah, the compounding thing for sure. And you make one good little decision that leads to another good little opportunity. And you know, I'm sure you have friends like this too. So I have friends that made just small decision after small bad decision after small bad decision and they end up in terrible terrible places. Which is awful to see. An interesting pivot on the make one good decision, it gets another good decision is when you've got a difficult conversation to have.

55:31My friends Alex says, the life that you want is on the other side of the difficult conversations you're unprepared to have. and he uses this analogy of when you know you work up to it for ages and the stress and you know you're in the Humvee metaphorically driving up to the conversation and You finally do it and you go I feel amazing and then Immediately like a psychopath like a serial killer you look around you go what are the bad conversations? Gonna have a like seeking out targets for you like why I need to ring my mom and tell her that she did that thing I've got that guy that didn't deliver the Amazon parcel correctly.

56:05I need to speak to this supplier blah blah blah. But it's the same with that. This sort of momentum thing is a big deal. It's why... In that vein, when I don't feel like going to train you just through, I don't feel like waking up or I don't feel like working out, whatever that thing is, that feeling that I mentioned to my daughter of like, I'm so happy I came and trained today. I know that feeling so well that it just totally overrides is the, oh, so you're projecting yourself. Yeah, like, oh, yeah, I know how much better I'm gonna feel in an hour and an hour and a half. I know that feeling so well.

56:40And I also know the other feeling, which is, and I didn't train today, you know, I, the Sunday and I decided I needed to do the office like no, train. I know that. And I think that is very helpful. What's still driving me now from a disciplined perspective?

56:59Well, I mean in Jiu -Jitsu, it's just, I love Jiu -Jitsu. Hey, you know, again, if you want to do something, how much discipline does it take? You know what I mean? I love Jiu -Jitsu. It literally takes more discipline to not do that. Yeah, yeah, like you get injured and your arms, you know, you can tell that you're arm. Every time you train, it's getting a little bit worse. It takes more discipline be like I need to take a day off. You would deny it. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So, yeah, I mean, I enjoy doing these things. I enjoy working out. Do I enjoy working out every single day? Nope. And that's when it's like, oh yeah, but I know the results of the long run.

57:42And I think that's an important thing that I've talked about. And again, I've talked about this with my daughter. or is like, if you give up a little bit today, like you can't get it back. Like if you skip a workout today, you can't, there's no possible way to get that back. When you let something go, it's gone. And Rome wasn't built in the day, but Rome didn't fall apart on the day either. It didn't fall apart because of one thing. It falls apart just a little bit at a time. Nobody gets fit overnight, nobody gets fat overnight. Exactly. And so you can't, you know, you can't submit, you can't submit, you have to, you have to get in there and keep it going.

58:29And I know the results of not doing the thing are not good. And I enjoy doing the thing. So in order to keep doing the thing, you gotta do the thing. Yes, it is, it's this endless fucking infinite regress of doing the thing. Yeah, I am, I kind of got the sense as well, Well, that story, but not wanting to go to the gym. I do think that that's the difference between discipline and motivation, right? Motivation. I didn't want to do the thing, discipline. I did the thing in spite of not wanting to do the thing. Yep, yep. And I've said many times, you can't count on motivation. Like it's not gonna be there for you.

59:03Or it may, but it may not be. And it's lovely when it comes along. If you wait for it to be there, it's gonna be more than you should. on the other end of that, you know, the person who is going through a string of, can I have one of those? You're on a drop -out go, please. Thank you. What's for this? This is iced tea lemonade. Okay. You're still pasteurizing these, right? Mm -hmm. Yeah. That's hard to go.

59:36Yeah, that's good. That's coming from a Brit. You know, a teeter. I know. Look. It's not the same sort of tea. It's not the same sort of tea, isn't it? Fucking Earl Grey. No, I appreciate what you guys did with this. We also did it with Nutonic. I really appreciate the fact that you didn't go heavy on the carbonation. You know, if you're going to have this before a workout, the last thing you want is not what? What? Just throughout it. So, no, yeah, that's lovely. You have a sour apple one? Could we do? Yeah, that's my favorite one. It's a good one. Yeah, it's also. So it's a popular one. Um, I imagine it's all well and good saying.

1:00:15Good decisions, beget good decisions. You've got this infinite dominoe tumble that helps you to keep them momentum up. And yes, it is your responsibility to deal with the repercussions of the decisions that you've made, including the string of bad ones for the last quite a long time, if that's the situation that you're in. But it's not particularly reassuring or comforting, I don't think, to somebody who's in the shit. So, what would you say to someone who's going through a bad month or a string of bad months and doesn't see any light at the end of the tunnel?

1:00:56What are your options?

1:01:00You know, like, okay, you're upside down financially, you relationship went that went south, you got, whatever those things are, your credit card debt is up, you got fired for your job, okay, you're in a terrible situation. What are your options? What you have to do is, well, you kind of have to prioritize an execute, right? Like, okay, I got all these bad things going on in my life. What is my biggest problem right now? And you gotta say, okay, I gotta start with solving that problem. And you gotta start to going back to the, I think it was the initial thing that we talked about. Take, take action.

1:01:41You got to take action and move forward. And if you don't,

1:01:49the downward spiral doesn't end. And if you allow it to continue to go down, that's where it's going to end up. And so you just have to, what are my options? Abandon the whole thing? Like no, that's not the option. That is not the option. What can I make better right now? And start to reassemble things and put them back together. Small steps. I remember advice to a friend that was going through a period of low mood and was feeling bad about not being able to get out of bed and wasn't able to show up and all of this stuff. As I did, you need to literally see every single micro step. Like you're in bed.

1:02:32You have gone to the bathroom a couple of times, you haven't seen sunlight in a few days. You've been ordering Uber Eats to the door and like, you know, sort of looking at the floor is the fucking delivery guy right? Like, you need to think about getting out of bed in the most rudimentary steps possible. So what's the first thing you need to do? You need to pull the covers off you. It's like, that is a step. Okay, hey, like, I mean, that's better than it was before, one foot out of the bed, two foot out of the bed, stand up, get a glass of water, put your shoe, you know, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, slow, slow, slow, slow.

1:03:02You know, there's something to, so people ask me about Jiu Jitsu and, and they, they don't like to fight, they don't like the idea of it, They don't like the physical close contact. Whatever the case may be like and they'll say, I don't like it. How long do I have to do it for? And one of the things that I say is you have to do jujitsu until you submit someone while you're training with them. And the reason I say that is because if you can train long enough that you submit someone, all of a sudden you go, oh, wow. I made progress. Yes, I see the reward. And so, yeah, do those little things, but do those little things until at the end of the day, you go, that was a pretty good day.

1:03:55Like, don't, because if you just get up and, okay, well, I got out of bed and Chris said, get out of the bed, but I still freaking don't like it. Yeah, I still feel like crap, right? Okay, well, get out and do a little bit more, and do a little bit more, and do a little bit more, and do a little bit more and you can stop when you get to the end of the day and you go, okay, you know what? Today was a pretty cool day and I feel good. Then if you want to go back to living in the hole and ordering Uber Eats, go ahead. But at least give me the effort to make yourself have a good day. You know the idea around you do BGJ until you're able to submit someone that shows that you've been there for long enough to have made some progress.

1:04:40Friend made this point to me in such a fucking smart point that I've never thought of despite the fact I've lifted weights for like 20 years. Going to the gym, but muscular training in the gym is one of the only pursuits in life where during the act of doing the thing, you see the future progressive where you will be if you keep doing the thing. So if I'm trying to learn Italian with you and we're on Duolingo or whatever the fuck the app is, At no point during the process of learning Italian, do I understand what it would be like in six months' time to be proficient in Italian? But if you go to the gym and you get a pump, you go, hey, if I keep doing this for six months, this is what I look like flat in a little while.

1:05:21And I think that it's such an under -spoken about dynamic of training. I really think that that is one of the biggest feedback loop mechanisms of why I happen. I mean, I guess in BJJ, if you just learned a particular movement and you've drilled it and drilled it and drilled it and then you get into rolling and you're like, huh, I've still got it. But next week you're like, well, the fuck does my arm like I can't remember how they're So maybe a tiny bit like that, but I don't think there's anything else. You don't get a pump preview anywhere else on the planet, except for in the gym. And I think that that's a undisputing about dynamic about why people love it.

1:05:53Yeah. Yeah, that's, that being said, you don't seem much progress, you know, the next day. You know, yeah, you get a pump. And depending on your physical makeup, like if you're overweight, you don't see a pump, you know, which is a bummer. And so if you're overweight, you're not gonna get any gratification going to the gym, external, you're not gonna see anything. So you gotta keep going. You gotta keep going until you start making some progress. You know, until you can do a pull -up. Well, you can finally do a pull -up. Okay, I've heard once that there's, you can't be overweight and do a pull -up.

1:06:28Like it's not possible. That's a good point. So pull -ups are good goal to have. Before we continue, I've been drinking AG1 every morning for years now, and it just got even better. AG1 next gen keeps the same simplicity, one scoop, one spade, but now comes with four clinical trials backing it. In those trials, AG1 next gen was clinically shown to fill common nutrient gaps, improve key nutrient levels within three months and increase healthy gut bacteria by 10 times even in healthy adults. Basically, they've upgraded the formula with better probiotics, more bioavailable nutrients and clinical validation.

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1:07:35I'm heading to drinkag1 .com slash modemiston. That's drinkag1 .com slash modemiston. That's a really good point. And fuck, do you see a true at Haynes? Do the 10 ,000 and one 10 ,000, two pull ups? Yeah. I had Cam on the show last week and I'm just completely blown away by what his kids have done. One of them's a ranger. And yeah. And true, it's true. Correct. Yeah, it's absurd, dude. I found that really interesting. income. It was, he sort of really beautifully opened up in a way that I haven't heard him do it before. And he was like, I don't know how I feel about pushing my boys that hard. When there were kids, you know, he's like, I regret in some ways doing them.

1:08:24He told me the story is something to Ranger. I think was maybe a prison warden or something like that. And I had, you know, good, stable, steady job, contributing, law enforcement, he, stuff. And he came home and said to his dad, so I can't get applied to Ranger School. I'm going to become a Ranger. He's like, well, you know, you've got, it's all well and good. Cam telling his kids when their kids, we don't settle for average. You're going to be an overachiever. You're going to work hard on everybody else. We're going to be elites on and so forth. But when you're faced with, you're going to maybe enter a kinetic future.

1:09:01The rubber really meets the fucking road with your principles there, right? Because it's your flesh and blood that's on the line and he asked why and his son said his own words back to him and said, well, you know, we're pains. We don't settle for average. We don't, you know, agree with me, Diocrity. I'm going to be special. You'll eat the blah, blah, blah. And it came out this sort of moment where he was like, fuck, like maybe I've pushed my kids too far. Maybe I've pushed them so far that they didn't feel happy or content with a normal, a good, normal job. And what if my son goes off to war and gets fucking killed or injured over there?

1:09:40Because I've put them in this place and it was a really interesting I've been fascinated for a very long time with the price that you need to pay to be somebody that you admire You know to be somebody that is an extreme performer that is in a position that most people would find enviable and And this is another one of those things. You don't understand what it is that drives people to do the things that they do. Now some people have a beautiful balance. You know, they do it from a place of self love and wanting to maximize their time on this planet. And it's this wonderful upward trajectory toward a goal that they believe in.

1:10:20But for a lot of people, it's running away from something that they fear. Insufficiency and need for validation, a comfort control, a recognition from the teachers that didn't believe in them, the bullies that got them in school, the parents that didn't give them enough attention, whatever it is. And I think it's just a really lovely redress for most people to think, okay, I think I want this thing. And as we said at the very, very beginning, what's the price that I need to pay in order to be able to get this thing? Do I want to pay that? Do I want to pay that price to be true at Haynes. What do I need to do?

1:10:56Why I need to have a childhood where I made to carry a rock up a fucking hill every night after school for like 10 years. Do I want that? Like, do I want to be working so hard that my hands are three times as his hands are the size of your hands? You know, that's where I need to be. I just think it was really, really interesting from Cam. You know, somebody who is an extreme performer, somebody whose sons are also extreme performance to just look at, okay. It was a really, really interesting reflection. Yeah, what, one thing that's very interesting when you look at like basic seal training, right?

1:11:32So basic seal training, it has something around an 80 % attrition rate. And it is a tough course of training. And one thing that is just completely makes no sense whatsoever is in ACO class, you'll have a kid from Massachusetts, whose both parents went to Harvard, he went to Harvard, and he spent his summers on the cape in their third home because the other ones in Vermont, the whole nine yards, and he makes it through Celestine. And then there'll be another kid from New York state who is also equivalently a Princeton kid, and he played whatever sport at Princeton and he'll quit. So, so you have two silver spoon kids.

1:12:23One of them will make it. One will not go to the complete other end of the spectrum and you have some kid that was raised in the barrio in LA that grew up, you know, a gang banger or at least gang banger adjacent and he'll he'll make it their training. and then another guy that's L .A., gang banger or gang banger adjacent, he'll, he'll quit. So, so it's really bizarre. And by the way, then there's the entire spectrum in between of what you just said. You know, oh, I'm going to make it. My girlfriend that don't mean she said I could never be a seal. Cool. And he's going to make it. Or my girlfriend who dumped me who said I'd never be a seal.

1:13:08She's right. I'm quitting. Like it makes no sense whatsoever. And so trying to figure out like who's gonna make it and who's not gonna make it is really, really difficult. That's why you can't just do the genetic thing before and be like, you know, what was that? Movie where they could predict where the people were going to commit crimes or not. Yeah, I don't remember the name of the movie, but. What? Minority report, thank you. Minority report for the seals. So we don't even need the test. It's like we know that you're going to pass, we know that you're going to fail, but you don't know that.

1:13:44And the entire reason for the test is to see what happens when it all comes crashing down. On that point, you know, you spoke about the person that's everything is going well for them. We've also talked about the infinite regress of good dominoes. After a while, I think a lot of people that have consistent success for a long period of time, reach a little bit of escape velocity and sort of floating out here, maybe my life is very different to the one that I was used to before. How, especially given that big trajectory for yourself as well, how have you learned to keep your foot on the gas when things are going well, not when things are going badly?

1:14:24I think it's just exploring new arenas. So, you know, you're doing some stuff and there's something that looks like it might be interesting to me and I'll go try that thing out and don't always win, but I'll give it a crack and see what happens and I'm not, you know, I'm very, I'm very much an iterative decision maker, meaning I make very small decisions at a time. I don't go all in on some chance. You know, I'm a little bit more methodical than that. And so yeah, I see something that seems like it's a good opportunity or something that I'm interested in. I'll go give it a crack. And if it works, then cool.

1:15:03I'll do more of it. And if it doesn't work, then well, maybe I'll back off. Right. So by not making huge commitments, at least up front, it allows you to experiment with ideas, play around with different things. It's just essentially it's maneuver warfare. which is you look at the enemy situation and you probe for areas of weakness and once you find an area of weakness you put more resources behind that area and assaulting that area and if you continue to get good results you put more resources and you continue to do well and and if you hit a wall and it's interesting that the terms that they use is surfaces and gaps so like surfaces as I hit it's like defenses so if I hit no penetration surface no penetration.

1:15:45If I hit a gap, I'm going to exploit more. And that's pretty much what I'm doing and what I've been doing for a long time. Okay. So exploring first and then exploiting after exploring first and then exploiting after. Yeah. I mean, certainly one of the lessons from today so far is this I'm not going to set the bar so unreasonably high that it's intimidating that it means that it's hard to make the first move, that it's chaotic, that it's an irreversible door. You know, that I go through it and I'm like, well, if I've put all of my money into this business, there is no more money to put into any other business.

1:16:21It's the equivalent of that, but for confidence, for momentum, for continuing going with good and bad momentum. So that's a, yeah, I think the small decisions is like a lovely little framework on that. But one of the other common areas, I think, that people are struggling with young men, very directionless at the moment. What's your advice? You speak to a lot of young men, train a lot of young men. What's your advice to young men that are struggling with direction in life?

1:16:55It's interesting because when I hear this, I'm always a little bit puzzled about who these young men are that are directionless because I work with a lot of different companies. I have a leadership consultant company. I work with all different kinds of companies. And, you know, whether it's construction companies, energy companies, software companies, finance companies, like they're a bunch of young men out there and they are getting after it. Whether they're line men, whether they're on oil rigs, whether they're software developers, like there's all kinds of people that are out there crushing.

1:17:33And so when I hear about people that, would you say are lost or? Directionless. Directionless? Yeah, I'm, what do you wanna do with your life? I guess that's my question. What do you wanna do with your life? Because you got one life, it's going by quickly and this is something that years ago, I spent a good chunk of my, I guess it was my 30s training MMA fighters. And we had a Jiu -Jitsu gym, we had an MMA gym. And so in the beginning, when a potential fighter would come in, and they'd be 22 years old, and I'd say, how old are you? And they'd say, I'm 22, and they'd say, I wanna fight. I wanna, there's a fight card coming up.

1:18:19I wanna be on it, and I was like, I'd tell them, listen, you got plenty of time, like, get better, train, up your skills. And I said that for probably three or four years. And then after three or four years, when guys would come in, I would start telling them the opposite, which is you need to get on it. You need to be in here every day. You're almost out of time. You're 22, you're late. Because I realized I saw a lot of people that didn't have any sense of urgency in their life. And when you don't have a sense of urgency, things aren't gonna happen. You need to make things happen as we already discussed.

1:18:55They're not just going to happen for you. You're not going to become a good fighter unless you make it happen. And you're not going to do anything in life unless you make it happen. So if you feel like right now you're looking around with and you're lost or directionless, I would take about 15 minutes and figure out what the hell you want to do with your life and I would start getting after it. So that's my advice. Take 15 minutes and figure out something that you're into and go crush that thing and make it happen. Yeah, I mean, for better or worse, life is really short. And it's this ridiculous irony that you only see in retrospect how short it is, right?

1:19:39It doesn't feel short at the time. But I bet when you get to your 80s and you look back, you think, holy fuck, that went buy in no time at all. Yeah, I had that conversation with my mom a couple of years ago and she said, you know, I was like, oh, hey, how's it going talking on the phone? And she said, oh, it's been a pretty rough couple months because this person died, this person died, this person died. And you know, she's almost 80 or something like that. And so people die.

1:20:14And I kind of, I said to her, you know, mom, all those people that you're talking about that are 80, 85, 87 years old. Like they've had a full run at it. I'm like, I buried my friends that are 27 years old, 30 years old, 31 years old. Like that's horrible. And so people that got this full run, man, be thankful that they got that full run. And right now, if you're a dude and you're 22 years old and you feel like you're directionless, get your shit together, man. And go start making things happen. Yeah, that sense of urgency is such an interesting one. You know, we are prepared to sort of waste yours trying to work out what would take us days to do.

1:21:13It is, I understand why some people have degrees of regret around that because they think, fuck, I don't know where that time went. I wish I'd known this thing sooner. But again, if action is the antidote to anxiety, the only way that you can work out what what it is that you need to do is by hurrying up and doing it. And again, if the fear of failure, the fear of the unknown is worse than the actual thing, it all ties together, I think, everything that we've spoken about. And by the way, Phil, like, yeah, you're gonna blow some stuff, you're gonna make some bad decisions, you're gonna screw some things up.

1:21:45Yeah, that's kind of cool. Like that does make for good stories, man. Go get them, go make them happen. Don't sit around being afraid that you might screw something up. you're gonna screw something up. That's guaranteed. Go do it. Get a good story out of it. And also prove to yourself that you're not made of glass. This was the first thing that I learned in striking. I'm sure that you at some point when you first started to learn as well, which is the probably is a new comer to any striking sport. The most important day that you have is the day when you stop doing that when a fist comes towards your face because you realize, oh, actually, if this happens, it's okay.

1:22:27Yep. And it's that symbolically for your life, right? No, no, no, no. If I get punched on the nose, my life continues and my nose is still there. Yep. Yeah, go get yourself punched in the face a few times. It's going to be good for you. A quick aside, if you haven't been feeling sharp or energized as you'd like, getting your blood work done is the best place to start, which is why I partnered with function. They're on lab tests twice a year that monitor over 100 biomarkers. They've got a team of expert physicians that then take that data, put it in a simple dashboard and give you insights and actionable recommendations to improve your health and lifespan.

1:23:02They track everything from your heart health to your hormone levels, your thyroid function and nutrient deficiencies. They even screen for 50 types of cancer at stage one, which is five times more data than you get from an annual physical. Getting a blood work drawn and analyzed like this would usually cost thousands, but with function it is only $499 and for the first thousand modern wisdom listeners you get another hundred dollars off making it three hundred ninety nine bucks so you can go to the link in the description below or head to function health dot com slash modern wisdom that's function health dot com slash modern wisdom I've heard you say as well comfort is a slow death how do you balance the need for rest and recovery without letting comfort weaken you in That way.

1:23:46Yeah, again, this is a good lesson I took away from training MMA fighters, which is, you're in a fight camp. You're in a fight camp for 10 weeks, eight weeks, 12 weeks, the varies depending on when the call comes, whatever. But you get a guy, okay, and Chris, you're my fighter, and Chris, you know, we start your camp, and you don't come into camp a slouch, right? You're in decent shape, but now we step it up. And now, because now it's really about, your skills should be in the bank. We're gonna hone some of the skills, we're gonna make them a little bit focused for this particular opponent, but now we're just really getting you in good condition to fight.

1:24:20So we got 10 weeks where we start, you know, we're doing two days, we're sparring, we're doing conditioning workouts, and you know, you've got your three training partners that you're sparring with. Sometimes you're grappling, sometimes you're punching, sometimes you're doing a combo. We used to call it shoot boxing or box wrestling, like you're gonna do the whole thing. And four weeks into it, five weeks into it, you come into, you know, you come into the gym and I'm watching you and the grappling guy that you normally tear up, he gets the best of you. And then we time you on the sprints and you lose to your sprint time by eight seconds.

1:24:58And I look at you and I go, hey man, tomorrow, day off, go eat steaks. And I might even say take two days off depending on how rough you look. So it's very obvious. It's so obvious when someone is overtraining, anyone can see it. You don't have to be a genius. And so it's the same thing with like life. If you start going backwards in life, you're probably trying to take on too much stuff and you could use a breather. So take a breather. Interesting that our ability to objectively look at the performance of somebody else compared with our ability to objectively look at our own performance. And also, you know, do I know if I'm selling myself short and if this is a moment where I need to push through versus I've gone too hard and it's actually time for me to rest and recover?

1:25:51I think this internal, the balance between having an internal jaco and an internal tyrant I think is a delicate one and it's one where you go, fuck, like, is this how close to the red line, am I here? Do I deserve the time off or do I not? That's another one of my rules is, oh, you need it today off today. You can't take it today, you can take it tomorrow. So if you wake up tomorrow, it today, and you're like, I feel like crap today, cool. Feel like crap today, go do what you're supposed to do. If you wake up the next day, and you go, yeah, I'm really, I'm hurting, cool. Take that day off, because you can get through today, even if you need a day off, but if you really, truly need a day off, and you take it tomorrow, I'm okay with it.

1:26:34That's a second idea. James Clear, this is the best idea around habits, which is basically the inverse of what you're talking about. He says, um, I never miss two days in a row. That, uh, one mistake is a mistake. Two mistakes is the start of a new habit. And, uh, it's just, it is one of the best ways, even with, you know, it just stops anything spiraling. All that we've talked about, this compounding down compounding, it stops that from happening. Yeah, two days off, not allowed. I think trying to just be a little bit more objective with that. You're able to see the numbers of your guys, the sprint numbers, they're not that.

1:27:15Do you ever do a wait? Do you ever have to do like a hard wait cut for anything or did you always fight at super... No, I would, like my actual competition days in Jujitsu. There was the open class and then there was like the heavyweight and it was like 212 -213 was the weight and so I would have to cut like maybe eight pounds, 10 pounds to get down to 2 .13 But I was never a guy that was cutting you know, 25 pounds. Now I had to do that with my kids because my kids all wrestle and I've And I've done it with a a million different fighters as well. So Yeah, I've been through a lot of weight cuts just not but have you one's yeah the most I've ever cut was probably like 12 10 pounds, right?

1:27:59Yeah, I uh, every single time that there's a UFC card on and some of the fighters have got a big YouTube presence invariably the most played videos of watching them go through the wait cut. Like people just like watching suffering, right? And um, yeah, I don't know what it is that's so compelling about that. It's the same if you watched the tour de France unchanged documentary on Netflix. I'll check it out. It is so fucking good. So it's like drive to survive the formula one thing, but it's about the tour. And the beautiful thing about that is it's protracted suffering, right? It's protracted storyline and narrative in this stage.

1:28:37I don't know, 25 stages or something like that. The tour de France turns to them. Some of them are speed stages, some of them are hills, some of them are, you know, and you get to see the ups and downs. There's this sort of permanent risk of injury. There's the permanent risk of crashes. There's always some catastrophes, especially that started the very, very beginning and you get to see it's not like in power. This is why there'll never be an amazing powerlifting documentary because the sport is done in three seconds. It's like you went down, you came back up, well done, oh you didn't, right?

1:29:13And either way it's over. We like seeing the same as the way cut. You know, you're going to check in one hour and you're going to check in two hours, you're going to check in three hours and get back in the sauna, get back on the bike, get back in the bath, but the towels back on you, wrapped a fucking thing around your head here, have some ice spit it back out into the, you know, t -t -t -t -t, all the way along. And we love to see that narrative as it goes. I wonder what would happen. I mean, they do those, um, BJJ matches that, uh, no time limit. Yeah. Right. And some of those go for three, four hours.

1:29:42Which, to me, is awesome. It is. It's like that's the ultra -indulterated race. The ultra -indulterated race. It's also the, that's kind of, there is no excuses, right? There's no, it's just you and another person. There's no time limit and I think those are very good way to do it. Yeah. Interesting stat that I found out, the US Army's recruitment numbers just hit the highest levels in 15 years. What do you think's arriving at? I think probably the new administration coming in. So I think you've got a administration and you know, that is very pro -American and patriotic and I think that that's definitely helping those numbers.

1:30:30What you make of Pete Hegseth and everything that's going on there. I think Pete is, I think people are, I think establishment people inside that world are scared because he is a change agent and I think he's bringing change. And I think he's aggressively bringing change, which, hey, when you aggressively do things, sometimes some things are gonna get, like there's gonna be some collateral damage. And that's one of those things that I think he has decided is worth it. And so I think he's making aggressive change and I think some people don't like it. And that's the way it is. Yeah. There's some report thing that I saw the 120 high ranking roles.

1:31:26Oh, yeah. I think you got rid of a bunch of flag officers for admirals in general. Yeah. Nine four star general positions and 81, 2 and three star roles. Check. That sounds like a lot. Do you know? I mean, I don't know if they have this information readily available, but I remember in World War II, in World War II, I think we had less generals and avials than we have right now. Yes, yes, yes. That's ridiculous. And we got this increasingly top heaviest. And it's everyone, you know, the military is an organ, is a human organization. And so when you have the ability, when people's human nature takes over, and I want to, I want to build my organization to be a little bit bigger than someone else's organization because it's going to benefit us and it's going to make me better.

1:32:14It's going to make our chain of command higher than people do that. And they've been doing it for a long time. Yeah. And it says, the goal of reducing salary expenses by streamlining upper ranks, reallocating leadership responsibilities to lower ranking offices. Army is expected to absorb a significant share of the reductions while the Marine Corps and Space Force will see minimal impact due to that already lean leadership structures. Yeah, the Marine Corps stays lean. I'm not, I don't know too much about Space Force. the army and the Navy probably have excessive jet flag and general officers.

1:32:50And again, he's right. You shouldn't have, you should have junior people in charge of things that are commensurate to their level of responsibility. It doesn't take an admiral or a general to do certain jobs that, you know, a lieutenant in a car or a major, if you look at what the majors did in World War II, it's like insane compared to what level is a major at what? An 04. So that's like the first field grade officer in the Army or the Marine Corps. In the Navy would be called a Lieutenant Commander. That's what I was, a Lieutenant Commander in the Navy. But if you look at what those guys did in World War II, it's like insane.

1:33:29And we, you know, we just, I think it's a good job getting back to that. I think it's awesome. Bring things closer back down to what the battlefield is well presumably. Yeah. Yeah. I wonder how much of it is just this difficulty, this inevitable bloat that comes along with any organization that's been around for ages. Yeah, 100%. What are you gonna do? Like fire this part? I like, oh, there's no role for us to elevate you into. You remember when Elon Musk took over Twitter? Everyone remembers that he fired. What do you fire? Two -thirds, three -quarters of the force? Yeah. It was like three -quarters of the team.

1:34:02Ten Asian guys running the inter -accompanies. and people freaked out like, oh, it's never gonna survive. I mean, obviously it survived, and it, in many aspects, got better. But you're right, when Jack Dorsey started Twitter, there was probably three employees, right? And then over time, it grew, and he hired engineers. I'm sure in the beginning, and software engineers and programmers, and eventually, eventually, he hired someone that was in charge of something that didn't really matter. And then that person hired a team, and then that person hired five more people. And so you guess it's bureaucratic bloat that happens and has it happened in the department of defense?

1:34:40Absolutely Absolutely and so Pete Higgseth comes in and says yeah, yeah, we're not doing it anymore Which is very contrary to what a normal bureaucrat would do because a normal bureaucrat would say oh you're putting me in charge of something cool I'm gonna make that something as big as I possibly can and bring as much money as I can he invited Doge to come in there and have a look. Tell me where we can save money. And if you don't think there's money that can be saved in the department of defense, you're crazy. Like of course there is. How much, how many billions of dollars are unaccounted for every single day?

1:35:15It's insane. Totally insane. It's totally insane. So I think seeing that attitude and I think is what's helping the recruiting a lot. The funny thing about the Elon pivot that maybe even relates to this and to the level of recruitment as well. I remember Elon put some job listing out saying, if you want to work harder than you ever have at anything, the most difficult problems, 18 -hour days, et cetera, et cetera, apply here, Twitter .com, such jobs or whatever. And the responses were, this is industrial revolution, era, style, tyranny. There is no respect for workers and all the rest of this stuff.

1:35:57And I was like, hey, look, I, not everybody is built to do that. And if you're not built to do that, then I imagine that this looks like a threat to you. But you don't understand what it's like to be in the top 0 .1 % of coders on the planet, to whom if you were to say you're not allowed to do this, you would be robbing them of a source of real wellbeing and pleasure. There are people who live to do that. They want to sleep under their desk. They want to be able to work on the hardest problems that he's so and so forth. And you get to attract that kind of talent, but you never get to attract that kind of talent who are the most efficient, who are gonna come up with the best kind of ideas.

1:36:35For as long as there's all of this fucking blow and bureaucratic retake and bullshit. Yeah, yeah. And the fact that you're thinking, okay, Twitter, maybe it's important, maybe it's not, I think we can all agree that fucking national defense is pretty important, right? So if there is a place where you should not be allowing bureaucratic fuckery and bloat and unnecessary roles to be in there. It's probably in the Department of Defense. Yes. And like I said, there's going to be some collateral damage and people will freak out about the collateral damage. But when something happens in you, oh yeah, we got rid of this program and it turns out that program was actually something that looks like we should keep.

1:37:16Okay, cool. We'll bring it back. It's not that big of a deal. And it passed the test, by the way, because everyone, ah, let's not get rid of that program. Okay, cool. You're right. Show me the numbers. Yeah, let's bring that program back in. So I think that it's something, you know, it's revolutionary. What's happening in the government? And yeah, I think it's going to go well. What do you think the future of warfare is going to look like? Someone who's spent a lot of time on the ground in kinetic situations, but are we on the verge of some new revolution with how this sort of war is going to be for?

1:37:54Yeah, absolutely. And if you watch what's going on in Ukraine right now, it's new, it's a new form of warfare. And so, you know, the drones, have you heard about the drones over there? Have you heard about these drones that are powered by fiber optic cables? Or they're not powered, but that's how they're controlled because the radio signals can be disrupted. And so you have to have a direct line and they're using fiber optic lines. So when that drone flies, it's dragging like a fiber optic cable behind it, but it's tiny. It's like the size of a hair. And so there's on the battlefield, there's just all these spider webs everywhere.

1:38:33But this is just things are going to advance. They're going to advance very rapidly. And we'll see what happens. You know, I've called it for a long time that we weren't going to need manned fighter aircraft anymore, but we're still making them. But I mean, that just can't last that much longer. And then you go to ground warfare, like, okay, we're going to have some robots that are coming. And then you have drones on top of robots. I mean, drones are, drones are robots. They're, it's weird that making something fly is so much easier than making a walker cron along the ground. So yeah, it's drones.

1:39:07And they'll make drones that it's, it's going to be a new form of warfare. And so what we need to do is the most important thing is just keep an open mind and not get the same thing I said about iterative decision making, right? Like you can't go all in on some specific type of drone right now because that drone is going to be obsolete when they figure out a way to eliminate the fiber optic cables or whatever the case may be. And I would, you know, in the back of my mind, I always think that ultimately, like you are going to need a human with boots and a gun that's going to go and secure and hold a place, right?

1:39:52I still think you have to have that capability at some juncture when the robots are done or when they figure out the defense for the Jones and the defense for the robots and they figure out an EMP that disrupts all the digital and all those things just flop over and die or whatever the case may be.

1:40:15So you've But as time goes on, I am definitely seeing less and less probability of that. Something you still need to prepare for, but less and less probability. The robots are coming. I wonder, you're apparently one of them. I wonder whether this next 10, 20 years or so is going to be an exciting time to be behind the scenes in the military because, you know, we had what from, you could probably tell me. I would imagine something like from 1950 to 2000, maybe mid -2000s, largely slowly iterative technology, similar kind of battle formations, you're making small adjustments here and there, look at me, man's explaining to you.

1:41:04And then 2020 to 2025, a fucking whole world, no change. And you think, huh, I know a lot of the previous plans are out of the window, which means that you need new tactics, you need new strategies, new approaches. And I wonder who is the person that's in charge of coming up with those new tactics? because yeah, I mean, experience like yours that understands what's going on. How applicable is that now moving forward? Why are the principles that you can use? And why are the ones we think that we're in a different world now? Yeah. Well, as I look at it, again, the principles that I talk about, the principles that I teach, they're all still applicable.

1:41:52They're 100 % applicable, but you're applying them with a new technology, which is what always happens. Like the principles of warfare don't change, just like human nature doesn't change. Like it doesn't change. Warfare is based on humans and humans apply human nature to everything that they're doing. So, but I think one of the most important things that we have have to do is, like I said, keep an open mind because things are gonna change so rapidly. And if you get caught in one idea of warfare, you're gonna miss the one that flanks you. You're gonna overcome it. There's something that doesn't end up being...

1:42:30Yeah, dude. It is a... It's fucking... I had Joe Lonsdale, part of Angelrill, who's also part of Palantir, and I had him on. And he was talking about these fucking bullets from space. There's like bullets that can be these rods that can be fired from space now, and that, you know, like it's this weird blend between ground warfare and space warfare and it's insane. So yeah, between the evolution that you've seen of these tanks are worth millions of dollars, these drones with a little program kind of C4, yeah, a worth less than a grand. And there's particular weakness vector spots on the tank. So the drones find those, then the tanks patch that up, then the drones get better, then the tanks put nets on the front, then the drones have little blades that cut through them.

1:43:25It's like watching the evolution of a predator and a prey, but happening month by month, you know, would change in a change in a change in a change in a change. Yep. And if you think you know everything, you think you've got the problem solved, you're going to get caught. So keep an open mind.

1:43:48Interesting. is real model consequences. Like, I want to fly, that's nice. It's like, we need to protect the skies. That's slightly different. You know, if fucking the Wright brothers were around only a couple of years later when World War I had started, it's like, maybe they've got a bit, I mean, they went pretty quick. But yeah, and you're seeing now exactly why that's the case. Because people are coming up with all manner of garage solutions made with salataping cable ties to fix really, really, what was it? They were talking about a javelin is a million dollar missile meant to shoot down a $500 drone.

1:44:23That's it. It's not a good way to win wars. No, but these EMP things, Joe was telling me about, I can't remember, it's a gadolinium or this special type of element that's inside of this super high frequency capacitor that deploys a really targeted pulse and it can shoot these things. Like this is fucking insane. Yeah, so yeah, you know, it's not been that long since you were yeah on the and to your point like I would I Will watch the World War two movie or a Vietnam movie and I'm like, oh, yeah, I see what's happening You like I I'd done something like that right there, you know Yeah, and and now you go well, I didn't have that happening I have a freaking drone flying over me trying to drop a grenade on me or It's just the advances are so rapid.

1:45:11Yeah, or a guy I would imagine now that in some of the special forces, at some point in the not -too -distant future, there'll be a fucking head of robot operations. For sure something. There'll be a guy who's got a fucking soup on a laptop and a drone and he can deploy all shit out of a Batman belt. And honestly, I mean, when I think about this, I always wished that instead of creating space force, they created a cyber force, like a totally separate cyber warfare because basically we're talking about the conflict of ideas, right? That's what's happening in war, essentially the physical manifestation of a conflict of ideas.

1:45:55And so what does that mean? That means information. And now we have your information versus my information. So what does that boil down to in this day and age? It boils down to cyber warfare and information operation operations, you know, how can I make the people on your team believe the ideas that I have instead of your ideas? That's media propaganda. Media propaganda, cyber, internet, that's what it is. And so I wish that we would have started an arm of that instead of space force. And but people get really scared because when I say, hey, Chris, what I want to do is I want to develop a weapon system that changes the way you think or the way your people think or the way the enemy think.

1:46:43That makes people really nervous. You're more comfortable. Most people are more comfortable with I want to make a weapon system that will, you know, massacre a bunch of you and then fire bullets. In a brutal way. Yeah. Yeah. I want to fire bullets in space that will take out whole neighborhoods or whatever. People are more comfortable with that than me saying I want to develop something that is going to change the way you think and change the ideas in your head. that for some reason makes people more scared. But in my opinion, that should be what the focus is, rather than just upping the physical, mechanical massacre of each other.

1:47:16You're looking to get sort of further up the stack. Preemptive the whole thing. Take Tulsi, tell her, she can, I'm sure she can fucking find a few billion dollars. Tell Tulsi's working on it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But no, you'd cyberforce is, I mean, I have to assume that this is contributed to through every different agency at the moment has little wings that are onto this. But you're right that it is a war of ideas that starts a war of bullets. And if you can try and cut off at the knees, I mean, there's a point to do with... Cut off at the knees. When you think about other aliens in space, one of two answers.

1:48:00One is No the Run and the other is Yes the Run. So either we're completely alone or there's others out there, both answers are equally terrifying. And I think when you look at some of the Western anti -Westernism, and I have to assume that we are able to create Eastern anti -Westernism and Russian anti -Russianism as well, there's one of two answers for that. That one is, this is because of foreign actors that are encouraging us to think badly of ourselves and to fight among our own group, and the other is we're doing this to ourselves. And the same as the aliens think, both answers are equally terrifying.

1:48:33Holy shit, we're either being puppeted or we're turning around and kicking the ball into our own goal over and over and over again. And something that is able to step, I mean, fuck me, was it, it had gobbles that was his you know, this is not new, but the technology is. Yeah, that's, you know, what success would Hitler have had if he wasn't, if he didn't have grubbles, if he wasn't so good with propaganda, if he wasn't so good with media, if he didn't have control over all that, well, he wouldn't have had near the success that he had. So I would recommend we, and again, that sounds terrible, right?

1:49:10Well, Hitler did it at work. Right? Yeah, it's like, well, Well, that type of warfare is how he had a massive amount of success. It was psychological warfare that he was using inside of his own country to convince people to think a certain way. It's in hearts and minds. How is it this cliche of winning hearts and minds? It's not just hearts and minds of your own people, but it's decreasing the hearts and minds of the enemy. Oh, maybe should we be doing this? Is this actually what we should... I mean, it's a really, really good point to bring up because the two main conflicts that we've got going out in the moment, Ukraine and the Middle East.

1:49:46Nobody can agree on what's happening. Nobody can agree on why it's happened. This great idea is called knowingness. So a lot of the time issues of belief and dogmatism in the modern world are later the feet of misinformation. So poor information is the reason for this being there. So if only, if the problem is misinformation, the solution is better information. right? If you understand something that isn't correct, we just need to give you something that correct. That misbelief and away we go. But knowingness, which is believing that you have an answer to the question before the question has been asked, it's like an anti -intellectual curiosity.

1:50:27It sort of insulates you from updating your beliefs. So way bigger problem than misinformation, because if it's misinformation, you can fix it with new better information. But if it's knowing this, you're completely averse. There's no penetration, there's no way that I can get through to you. And this is the, I think the odd realization when people are so fucking ardent, we know that the fact is settled around this, that we know the fact is settled around the Middle East and this is why it happened. And we know the fact to settle around Ukraine. It's like, hey, dude, you're saying that you know the fact is settled.

1:51:04No one can agree on the facts. How the fuck can the facts be said? You think that your fact is settled. Somebody else has a difference. I mean, even people talk about like, what do we mean by facts? We're in like a post -truth era. It's insane. It's insane. It is. And it doesn't surprise me. Maybe even that. I don't know what to believe. Maybe apathy, confusion, nihilism, uncertainty. Maybe that's the outcome. Maybe the outcome isn't even to give you some sort of narrative that you're supposed to believe, maybe the outcome that you're trying to get to is I don't know any narrative to believe. And that makes you more malleable, more manipulative, down the line.

1:51:44Yeah. Well, I think in this case is just trying to have an open mind about what you see happening and not completely buying into any narrative and just kind of seeing what's happening and understanding that that's the way things are going to go. Like we're going to have people killing each other. This is on the unfortunate horrible aspect of mankind is that we have wars and we kill each other and we've been doing it the whole time. So that's a beautiful horror. When the, when the, yeah, it is, but when, when the collateral damage is broadcast to the world, you know, I get even Vietnam, we would have got a McNamara, the McNamara fallacy, the entire point, the problem with that was looking at the wrong numbers, but people were seeing the numbers, right?

1:52:44Now you're seeing every civilian casualty, every building that was hit accidentally or on purpose or as, you know, a tactic. And oh, they didn't send a message that said that you need to leave 10 minutes before or they used a particular size of armament that wasn't permitted for this area. You get into this tied up in red tape and legalese about what the specific and it's just you're drowning in information. And you're seeing, I guess, for the first time ever, you're seeing collateral damage, which I have to assume is a byproduct of every kinetic conflict in human history. You'll see that. The big, all kinds of mistakes to talk about in Vietnam, but one of the things was the battle of the I -Dring Valley, which was like the first major like engagement, 1965, US military against the, the, the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese.

1:53:43And when we got done with that battle, we had killed like a thousand of them and they had killed a hundred of us. And what McNamara and his, what was their crew called the, anyways, the nerds, they had some name form. Anyways, what those guys calculated was, okay, see, we can kill a thousand of them, they only killed a hundred of us so we can beat them. And what they didn't realize is that you kill one American and we are devastated and the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese and the Communists were like, oh, you killed a hundred of us. Cool. We have a hundred more. And so we were, we had different, a different datum to start with.

1:54:31We had a different premise of what we were willing to sacrifice. And so this is what we're seeing around the world is like, what is, what are are these various sides willing to sacrifice for their cause. And we in America look at it and we have a totally different perception of what it is. On any sides, we have a hard time comprehending other people's conflicts. And we've gone into, you know, we go into countries, oh, of course, everyone's going to want this, everyone's going to want this outcome. We don't understand their perspective. And so we don't understand what outcome they actually want and when you go in and try and pose you're outcome on people they don't like it That doesn't work with your kids it doesn't work with your employees and it doesn't work when you try and do it to hold nations So you have to consider that as you make moves Mm -hmm.

1:55:27You know he should have on the show a guy called John Lyle So he wrote a book called the dirty tricks department It was a book about the founding of the OSS and the insane tactics that they used in World War II to try and stop World War II. So one of my favorites was they found the gardener who grew the vegetables that were eaten by Hitler at the Eagles Nest. And there was a psychological profile done of Hitler saying that he had a fragile hold on his masculinity. So they tried to get this gardener to inject the vegetables with female sex hormones so that they Hitler's moustache would fall off and his voice would go soprano and He would lose his mind and then they would win the war.

1:56:10So that was one of them. I didn't realize that I think it's foxes in Japan are a symbol of foreboding. So they wanted to create glow in the dark foxes and put them onto the shores of Japan so that they would demoralize the Japanese but they couldn't get a hold of them in a foxes so they'll use raccoons instead. They'll get these raccoons and they're going to paint them with luminous paint like foxes but then they put them in the sea and all the paint washed off so then they got a PA system and a huge fox head on the side of a ship and they were broadcasting so it's just so good but he's got another one coming out which is the OSS came into the CIA and then I think this one is the transitions through that.

1:56:52So interesting, but when you think about all of the different strategies psychologically that have been tried to be, okay, we're gonna try and interject here. We're gonna try and interject down. I certainly prefer those over, I prefer painted raccoons over bombs. Yeah, well, they might be the same. Jack, I did, you're awesome, man. I appreciate the heck out of you. Good to see you, Vicarania. Thank you. What have you got coming up next? What can people expect? You've got a Chris Pratt doing, starring as the dramatized version of one of your books? Yes, indeed. Yes, indeed. Is that filmed, finished?

1:57:24So, filmed. So, we already filmed it. We filmed it in August, September, October. We filmed it up actually around here in LA and Pomona area. And yeah, we filmed it. We're in the editing process now. It's, and it's, you know, so I've seen like the, it's gonna be awesome. It's gonna help a lot. Seal, Dad, Executive Producer Hollywood. The Triple Threat. Yeah, I guess. Yeah, dude, I can't wait to see that. It's awesome. Chris is great. I appreciate the fuck out of you for coming here. So thank you. Thanks, brother. Good to see you, dude.