Jocko Willink and Joe Rogan dissect Chris Cornell’s suicide, questioning how success and wealth fail to prevent despair while debating "affluenza" and the necessity of struggle for mental balance. Jocko contrasts reckless youthful feats—like free-solo climbing—to disciplined growth, citing UFC fighters’ physical and mental mastery, but mocks chi-based invincibility claims as fringe ideologies akin to conspiracy theories. They critique modern warfare’s lack of transparency, warn against UBI squashing ambition, and praise podcasting’s unfiltered freedom over corporate media, where divisive activism often replaces real challenges. Jocko’s Warrior Kid method—incremental discipline for kids—mirrors his leadership philosophy: hardship builds resilience, while shielding from struggle fosters weakness. [Automatically generated summary]
To me it just really kind of Reveals the complexities of human life.
Yeah exactly what you're saying to have a guy that is at the pinnacle of his skill the pinnacle of fame the pinnacle of money And and for him to say you know what not gonna do it anymore Yeah, I don't know what was going on in his head, obviously.
Well, that's one of the really hard things when you start talking about suicide for people that, for someone like me, and I haven't had suicidal thoughts, right?
So when you go from that to somebody that not only has the thoughts, but then goes ahead and executes it, it's very hard to comprehend.
Everybody's got their own Unique mindset and it's just you you know, what's really crazy man is I've read the statistic the other day about suicide That people in poor neighborhoods are far less likely to kill themselves people that are in the struggle Yeah, well, I actually believe that because they're fighting for something.
Yeah And someone that's already got everything and then they're then end up with no drive with no goal And nothing left to achieve and so then all of a sudden they're just staring at the mirror without anywhere else to go You know, I'm not talking about Chris Cornell in particular, but for some people I know one of the things that happens is that when they become very successful and they're still not happy Then they get hopeless.
There's no doubt about having something that you're striving for, some goal.
And like you just said, when all those goals have been achieved, and now you're sitting there at the top of the mountain, and now you don't feel happy, what do you do?
Yeah, and I actually, early on, I had someone, you know, say something along the lines of on social media, on Instagram or on Twitter, you know, oh, you're just going to post another picture you're watching.
I was like, unfollow me.
Like, just don't follow me.
It's no big deal.
I'm not making you do it.
And now it is kind of turned into something where I'm doing it every day, regardless of anything else in the world.
There's like a single mom somewhere in the valley here that's working three jobs that's getting up at 3.30 in the morning so she can go work as a waitress somewhere before she's got her other day job that she's got to go through so she can feed her kids.
I get up almost as a luxury at this point.
I mean, I'm a retired guy from the military, so I can kind of get up whenever I want.
I get up early as a luxury.
Sort of but you also get up because that's who you are Yeah, and I get up because it is it is a way to maintain discipline in life for sure to get that stone out and sharpen that blade every morning It's the grind that sharpens the axe, indeed.
Actually, I had Tim Ferriss come on my podcast, and when he came on, he was like, hey, I don't know if I'm the right kind of guest for your podcast, because my podcast is about war and death and killing and all that stuff, and so Tim's are about being better and stuff like that, so it's easy to contract.
Tim's podcast is about improving yourself, and mine is about war and genocide and horrible things.
And he said to me, you know, hey, I don't know if I'd come on the podcast, but, you know, maybe I'm not the right type of guest or whatever.
And I wrote back to him, and I said, hey, man, you know, you've been through some dark stuff in your life because he wrote a blog post years ago about him being suicidal and him contemplating and planning to commit suicide.
So maybe it's 26. 15 years ago, and he was under all this pressure.
You know, he was an Ivy League guy, and he was trying to finish school, but then it wasn't working out, and it was just problematic, and so he started saying to himself, okay, well, how am I getting out of this?
Well, there's one way to get out of it, and luckily, he didn't do it, but when he came on, you know, that's what we talked about, and what he said, you know, as he was making recommendations from, again, from a guy who's been there, Was like, hey, if you're trapped in your mind and you're starting to feel that way, go do something physical.
Get in your body, get out of your mind.
The same thing you're saying.
When you're feeling bad, when you're feeling down, go out and swing a kettlebell around and you will feel better.
For some people especially, they're just experiencing way too much pressure.
And that pressure, a lot of times, it's just an imbalance in perspective.
And some of it's important.
Like, I was talking to this mom once.
Her daughter does...
Gymnastics with my daughter and we were talking about kids killing themselves where she used to live She used to live in one of the really wealthy tech areas outside of San Francisco and a bunch of kids that went to school with her daughter that were like 15 16 were jumping off bridges and shit like it was a Like an epidemic and they were trying to figure out what the fuck is going on and they're literally calling it affluenza That these affluent kids and their families are literally worth a billion dollars.
I mean, everybody's super rich, and they're having this insane pressure before high school and in high school to be in Ivy League schools and to get 4.0s, and they're not having any fun, and they're not experiencing life, and they don't have any hope, and their parents are all on fucking pills, and they're just killing themselves.
Yeah, and as you said, it really is a piece of perspective because if you think about when you watch one of your buddies go down the downward spiral, maybe it's not to suicide, but whether it's drug addiction, a lot of times some female, the girlfriend, the ex-wife will just take them on the downward spiral and they can't get out of it.
And if they were to step back, if it was you and your buddy watching one of your other friends go down the spiral, they'd go, oh my God.
That's crazy But when you're in that spiral people get caught in that and they can't they can't get the perspective of what it looks like from the outside Yeah, it's hard for people to break momentum to momentum That's good momentum or meant to momentum this bad momentum when I get a like when I get on a good groove or working out all the time I feel it like after I'm done working out.
I'm like, yeah I can't wait to get in there again.
I can't wait to work out again.
That's the good momentum.
But then there's that bad momentum like you get injured or something like that and you can't do anything for a couple weeks and then to try to get that kickstart that motor up again, it's hard to get momentum.
I've caught some some flack for saying there was these big science experiments or something and they said that willpower Dissipates throughout the day and the more decisions you have to make the weaker you get throughout the day and I think that's BS I agree with what you're saying which is We're good to go.
Fats are starting to look pretty good, and then the next thing you know, it's pizza, and then when you get home at night, you're just watching TV, and that can continue on for days, and then days turn into weeks, and then the next thing you know, you're fat and out of shape.
Yeah, and then on top of that, if they did do that study, like, really, I want to know what those people were eating, because that's a big factor, too, because there's a lot of people that are eating shit food, and then by the end of the day, your body's in a crisis.
And if you're eating a big, like, bullshit lunch filled with nonsense, like, your body's got to process all that stuff.
And so at the end of the day, yeah, you're going to lose your willpower.
So, like, when five o'clock, six o'clock rolls around, you're going to be tired.
But if you have a healthy lunch, and, you know, you're properly fueled, and then you also have positive people in your life, everyone's motivated, by the end of the day, you're going to feel good.
Like, say if you're doing jujitsu with a bunch of other people that are doing jujitsu, Everybody's enjoying it.
You're looking forward to that 6.30 class.
Everybody's fired up.
You get out of work.
You're fucking pumped, man.
When you get out of work, you're fueling up with water.
You're trying to get some electrolytes in you because you know you're going to get out there on the mats and you're going to sweat it out.
When you get done with work and it was a grind and you ate crappy food and whatever happened happened and you got yelled at by your boss or whatever, and the real easy decision is to be like, I'm not going to go train tonight.
Those are the nights you've got to train because that is going to kick you back onto track real quick.
When you get in there and you see your boys and they're getting ready to tear you up on the mats, and that's going to get you on track as opposed to going home and watching TV, which isn't going to do anything for you.
Yeah, and if jiu-jitsu's not your thing, whatever the fuck your thing is, just go and do it.
Just force yourself to do it.
And if you feel like shit because you ate lunch, then your lunch was, you know, filled with bullshit, well then, hey dummy, don't eat shitty lunch tomorrow.
Tomorrow try a nice salad.
You know, try a salad with some salmon and see how you feel then.
You're like, hey, I feel way better today at six o'clock.
Duh!
Yeah, now your decision-making will be better.
Like, people don't understand how significant it is.
Like, all these little decisions, those are like, that's the path for the rest And if you decide to go to fucking Cheetos chocolate chip cookie route, you're just making a shit path.
You're carving your fucking path through broken rocks and glass and it's not the way to go.
And if you've ever been truly thirsty before, like in the desert where you haven't had water or you didn't bring enough water and you're really thirsty, Coke isn't even appealing at that point.
You get in that mode where you've been truly thirsty, which I've been before.
Not like I was going to die, but I've been close to getting some sort of a heat stroke scenario happening and then got to a stream, pumped the water, drank the water, and that's the most beautiful thing in the world when you don't have water and you get it.
Yeah, Dana White and I have talked about this so many times that it transcends every language.
Cricket is so giant in England, right?
And in India.
Try putting that shit on TV in America.
We'll be like, bitch, get that fucking stupid paddle game off TV. What the fuck are you doing?
We don't even know what's going on.
Or conversely, baseball.
You play baseball to some country that doesn't accept baseball.
They're like, what is this nonsense?
This takes forever.
You know, I mean, the real sport of MMA, like, is not, I mean, it is unquestionably, it's a sport, and there are rules, but it transcends.
You know what's happening.
You might not understand the ground that much when submissions, but when you see a guy turning red, because the other guy's behind him, choking the fucking life out of him, you get it.
I mean, maybe it's just you and I. You know, I think anybody I think anybody that that tries it and gets that that's why that's why jujitsu is getting so popular Because you take a random person on the street male female 10 years old 20 years old 40 years old You put them and you say okay when you get them this other person in this position right here And you get their arm around you get your arm around their neck You can kill them or you can accept you can accept their tap and you can have mercy on them That's
Like, I'm sure you've recognized that, like, I feel better working out with black belts.
I feel safer training with guys that are, like, super high level than I do with even guys that are, like, an athletic white belt that might spaz out and accidentally headbutt me.
Yeah, and I mean I get asked that question all the time too is people say hey am I too old to start jiu-jitsu?
I'm 52 years old I'm 49 years old and what I tell them is you're not too old You're definitely not too old but you need to be smart and one of the smartest decisions you need to make is choosing your training partners and And you don't want to train if you're a 52-year-old guy that's never trained before, and you're a white belt, and you're going to get on the mat.
The person you don't want to train with is the other white belt that's 22 years old, that's on steroids, that's going to go psycho, and he just doesn't know how to control his body.
Whereas the black belt, the percentage chance of you being hurt by a black belt, if you're a white belt that's just...
My kid takes a mixed martial arts class, and the instructor asked me to come in and demonstrate one particular type of move the other day.
And so I demonstrated it, and we were talking about some different positions that are important for kids to recognize, like how to make sure you don't get...
Kids were giving up their back when they were trying to pass guard.
They were trying to pass guard and they were pushing down.
And I'm like, you never want to turn your shoulder like that because I had explained to them the arm drag.
So I'm explaining to these kids the arm drag.
And you see their little brain spinning, man.
And you see them practicing on each other.
And they're laughing.
They're girls.
So you're watching these eight-year-old girls having the best time choking each other and everything and going through these motions.
To me, I think it's fucking awesome, man.
These kids do it all the time.
No one's getting hurt.
They're having a great time with each other.
It's just this primal release.
Let's get all that shit out of there, and then you can be civil.
Yeah, well, even if there's no jujitsu instruction involved and there's no mats around and you take two kids and you put them in the yard, eventually they're gonna start wrestling with each other.
I was at a party once with my kids and these two boys started going at it and neither one of them had any training, you could tell, but it's just natural.
They're getting their hips low, and they're trying to push each other, and they're trying to figure it out, and neither one of them knew what to do.
And I kind of wanted to go up and start coaching them, but they're just playing in the grass.
It's fascinating to see just natural human instincts.
Yeah, and that's the other thing I've noticed in teaching kids jiu-jitsu is...
The kids that are a little bit more cerebral, you know, the parents will think, well, you know, my son, he's kind of a nerd, he's kind of a smart kid, I don't know if he's going to like this, but the opposite is actually true very often, where the kid that's cerebral, he'll recognize, as soon as you show him three things, like you said, his wheels are turning, he's going, wait a second, this is a skill I can learn, and if I know this, and the other guy doesn't know this, I'll be able to beat him.
And so cerebral kids often...
Get into it even more than than you know some kid.
They're assassin nerds It's really kind of interesting it is and and you're you're you're not being facetious when you use the word assassin nerds because you know this is you know if you go back before you knew Jiu Jitsu before I knew Jiu Jitsu before I knew Jiu Jitsu and you know I was a big Navy SEAL 200 pounds and One of those kids that's 145 pounds would absolutely have destroyed me if we got into a fight.
Boom!
Take my back, put me to sleep.
You know what I mean?
I might, you know, put up an okay fight and hit him one time in the side of the head, and then he's in on my back and put me to sleep.
I mean, it's more complex than chess because, you know, in chess you've got these different pieces and they're restricted in their movements.
Jiu Jitsu is not restricted in its movement and every transition has so many different possibilities and so many different setups.
There's so many different times you get led one way and then just to get you to defend so that they can establish a second position and they get you to defend that so they can establish a third position.
Yeah, and that part of it is is what I think really for me transferred from jiu-jitsu to not only to the battlefield but to life as well because The big thing in jiu-jitsu from my perspective is that you don't go Strength against strength right if I'm I don't if I'm trying to choke you I don't try and choke you overtly I don't just grab your neck no I work on your arm and I put pressure over here and I pass your guard and then I Eventually while you're thinking about something else boom.
That's when I grab your neck or that's when I grab your arm and And that's what I think on the battlefield You know you can't you just don't attack hardened positions of the enemy and in life You know if you're trying to be a leader you're trying to step up and lead somebody you don't just come down and bark orders at people because that's not as effective as Maneuvering and adjusting your position and getting in a better position and then getting that person to give you what you want instead of trying to take it from them Yeah, that's a really important lesson for parenthood.
You're 100% it applies to kids, but it applies to adults as well.
And that is people need to understand why they're doing what they're doing.
And, you know, if I want you to go take down some building and capture some bad guy, I don't go, hey, hey, Joe.
I want you to go take down this building.
I want you to capture this bad guy.
These are the guys I want you to take with you.
Here's the route I want you to take in.
Here's the methodology I want you to use for the clearance.
Because then when I send you to go do that mission, it's not your mission.
It's my mission.
I came up with a plan.
You didn't.
So you might have thought there was a better way to do it, or you might have had a different idea of how to get it done.
And now when you go out there and you meet some kind of resistance, whether it's an obstacle you didn't expect, or whether it's some scenario that you didn't foresee...
Instead of you trying to overcome it, you just blame me.
You just look, Jocko came up with this stupid plan, and here we are.
It's failing.
Forget it.
We're going back.
We're not going to carry out the mission.
Whereas if I said, hey, Joe, here's what I want you to do.
Go figure out the best way to do it.
And now you come up with a plan.
And now you make up all the methodology of how you're gonna get it done, and you decide who you're gonna take with you.
Now it's your plan.
You own that plan.
And when you go out in the field and you meet a little resistance, guess what you do?
You say, I'm gonna find a way around it.
I'm gonna overcome this.
I'm gonna overcome that obstacle.
I'm gonna make it happen.
And that's another piece of leadership, and it's the exact same thing with kids.
If you tell your kid, you know, you will get good grades in school, That means nothing to them, but if you explain to them hey I would love for you to get good grades and here's why it's gonna open opportunities for you in the future It's gonna allow you to be able to outsmart people because you have more knowledge than them and then you're gonna be able to end up making more money Which is actually give you more freedom in the long run instead of doing a job that you don't want to do If you explain all those things to a kid, it's going to be a lot more successful than just, do what I told you, get good grades because I said so.
Because that's another big piece of this is that all these ideas about interacting with human beings, they just don't change.
Like, there's little variance, but whether you're dealing with kids or whether you're dealing with adults and whether you're dealing with business people, whether you're dealing with soldiers on the battlefield...
The leadership principles, they don't change.
And therefore, you can, whether you're trying to get people to go out and capture and kill a bad guy, or whether you're trying to get them to build some product and sell it, the principles of leadership don't change.
You're still trying to get a bunch of totally independent people, right?
And that's one of the myths we have to overcome a lot, because everyone thinks, oh, and the military is just like a robot, and that's just not true.
Everybody in the military is free.
They're people.
They're people.
They're free thinking people and they're gonna come up with their own ideas They're gonna have with their own agendas and they're gonna think of ways to do things that they think are better than yours So you can have all these independent free thinkers and you got to get them on board with the same plan to you To go out and execute and so it doesn't matter if you're on the battlefield or in business That's what that's what you're trying to get done and the leadership principles don't change To me,
as a person who's never been in the military, that's one of the fascinating aspects of how it works, is how do you get all these different people to follow through on a plan, and who are the leaders, and why do the leaders have the right ideas, and who educates them to having the right ideas?
I know that a lot of people are excited about where the military is right now, like Tim Kennedy re-enlisted.
Yeah, he re-enlisted because he believes that the military has support now and look, Tim Kennedy believes he was put on this earth to kill bad guys and that's what he wants to do.
And in his eyes, this is the way that it should have been.
That you should give the military the chance to do their job.
That's their idea.
And then other people believe that there should be much more civilian oversight, and there should be much more checks and balances before things get done.
Well, I think there's two different things that you just talked about.
That is what the military gets told to do and how they do it.
And those are two different things.
And I think that, yes, absolutely, the civilians should control and do control the military, by the way.
They do control.
The civilians are under control, or the military's under control of civilians.
And yet, once you say, okay, this is what we want to have happen, you need to let the military professionals figure out how they're going to go and make it happen.
Because if you're in that like one of the things that was explained to me by a friend who's a Navy SEAL He was saying that when something needs to get done and you have all these people that are telling you how you can do it how you can't do it like in people that are not in Experiencing combat and don't understand what what could or could not go sideways Like to put more problems in place or to put more checks and balances in place You're actually gonna put these people in more danger that that is true
Yeah, you should like I said if you let the civilians decide what it is that needs to be accomplished and then the military leaders decide How they're gonna go ahead and make that that happen and I mean it goes back to it goes back to Vietnam You know there was too much civilian oversight of what was happening in Vietnam and the military leaders were They didn't really have the wherewithal, not even the wherewithal, they didn't have the free reign to go out and try and make things happen the way they wanted to, and it ended up in a big quagmire.
Because it didn't totally make sense that it was happening, and then now we know that the Gulf of Tonkin was very likely a false flag, and that there was some sort of motivation to get there in the first place.
And then you're dealing with guerrilla warfare for the first time ever in U.S. history.
Like, they didn't exactly know how to handle this.
And we didn't adapt very well to what was happening on the ground, which is always going to be problematic if you have close-minded people in the military.
If people are close-minded, you're not going to be able to move forward when the battlefield changes.
And the battlefield changes all the time.
I mean, you can look at Iraq.
Iraq, the battlefield changed drastically from this big conventional force that we went up there to fight against Saddam's big army.
Well, once that fell apart, then what happened?
Now all of a sudden we were facing guerrillas again and an insurgency and it took us several years to change our strategy from We didn't even know what to do.
Oh my god.
You know, what do we do?
There's all these people running around What do we do with these all these people running around and how do we get these people under control and and the civilians want us here?
And and yet if we don't do the right thing now the civilians don't want us here What do we need to do?
So it took us some time to adjust our strategy in Iraq and Luckily, we had some good leaders that that went ahead and made those changes Isn't it also that when when you're in war and though the strategy and not the strategy But the motivation is very clear like if you fight against Hitler's army in World War two Yeah, this is very clear that you're dealing with an evil force Whereas in Vietnam.
It's like wait a minute.
Why are we here like what's going on the communism what's happening?
extremely extremely challenging no doubt and that That is why and you know, I've talked about this before if if America Any nation is gonna go to war you have to decide that this is the most important thing in the world You have to and the wills that I talked about that you have to have to execute this war you got to have you got to have the will to kill people in any Again, I say this all the time.
No one wants to hear it because it's ugly and horrible.
But when you say you're gonna kill people in war, you're not just gonna be able to perfectly kill just the bad guys.
Civilians are going to die.
It is a nightmare.
Kids, women, it's horrible.
It's awful.
And if you think, oh, I'm gonna go to war and we're just gonna kill the bad guys, it's not gonna happen.
War is too complex.
It's just not gonna be saying like, hey, I'm gonna go and fight in the UFC and I'm not gonna get hit.
It's not gonna happen.
You're gonna get hit, you're gonna get bruised up, you're gonna get dinged, and it's the same thing in war.
So you have to have the will to kill people.
Of course, it's easy to have the will to kill the bad guys, but then you have to accept the fact that some innocent people are going to die, and that is gonna be awful.
And then on the other side of the coin is, of course, if you're gonna send people to war, people, Americans, are gonna die.
And there's nothing you can do about it.
You have to accept that fact.
And, you know, that's why Vietnam was just the ultimate tragedy in many respects, because we were killing a lot of civilians, we were losing a lot of Americans, but we weren't progressing the way we needed to.
Like when the Bush administration wouldn't let them take photographs of coffins and send them home, like a lot of people are really upset because there's a lot of people that felt like, look, Americans should know that there's a cost to this and they should know that there's consequences to these actions.
And they were saying that these consequences and knowing about these consequences could Lesson morale, could lessen support back at home when they really need it?
And the people didn't really need to know this.
What they need to know is we're on the right track and we're doing well.
And whether it's the right decision to keep the Americans in their beautiful bubble that they live in and let them know that this war is happening, but you don't have to see The the brave Americans coming home that have sacrificed their lives and interestingly if you remember I think it was Tarawa the Battle of Tarawa in World War two and For the first time so we were we needed money to run World War two a lot of money war bonds and all that and we were kind of falling behind and we needed some money and one of the first times that they released a
lot of pictures of American dead Americans was I think it was the Battle of Tarawa and There was all these Americans washing up on the beach.
I mean Marines that had drowned and got shot and it was awful But they did it for a reason they did it to show like hey, this is real.
This is happening We need to put pitch in we need money.
We need to you know save Save meat.
Save oil.
Don't use your cars.
We all need to get in for the big win, right?
And that's the opposite of what we're talking about when they're saying, hey, you're not allowed to take pictures of dead Americans that are being killed.
And, you know, I think there should be some level of transparency there when...
America should see what is happening, what is the cost, because it's real easy for Americans to sit there and allow these young kids to go overseas and fight and die, or be wounded, gravely wounded, and just to shut those, you know, just ignore them, because I don't care because I'm over here in the mall.
No, maybe we should not only, you know, Maybe we should not only show pictures of the coffins that are coming back, but maybe we should explore and show the lives that those men sacrificed and who they were and what they did and what their families were like and their wife and kids and mom and dad that they left behind that they gave up.
And why did they give it up?
Because they believed in freedom.
And so now we're just going to say, oh, that's not happening.
It is kind of strange, right, when you think about how little access to information people really had back in World War II. They were counting on the news, they were counting on newspapers, and now today we have massive, massive access to information instantaneously, but yet you get less of it when it comes to that.
I mean, obviously, when there's an incident that happens overseas, you can find out about it on Twitter as fast as you can find out about it through, you know, waiting for a real news source to come up with it.
Yeah, and then the same thing could be said for, hey, sometimes civilians are going to get killed.
And what do we do?
What do we do then?
Do we brush that under the rug and we just show the Americans getting killed or do you universally show what's happening?
What war is man war is jacked up I'm here to tell you war is not glorious.
It is not fun and it is it is a horrible horrible event and So yeah, I think you should expose it and I think you should expose it at a high level so that people understand what we're getting into and and as horrible as war is There's many times throughout history where war is the absolute in my mind in my opinion the right thing to do and we don't have a choice and and we need to do something when when horrible things are happening and And you know I think that's you know on my podcast I talk about like
the like I said I talk about war and death and horrible genocide and and that's one of the reasons why I think it's it's gotten a lot of traction is because I'm talking about things that are otherwise being ignored and I think people do want to know I think people do want to understand war to deeper level so that way when they hear a Politician up there saying hey we should go to war they can at least say to themselves I know what I know what he's talking about and And he's not just talking about, hey, we're going to wave the flag and we're going to send some soldiers over there.
They're going to kick ass.
They're going to come home.
We're going to high five.
That's not what war is.
And let's not ever forget that that's not what war is.
War is a man and another man on a battlefield surrounded by people, civilians, and they're trying to kill each other.
And it's a bloodbath.
And we shouldn't forget that.
And is it necessary sometimes?
It absolutely is.
It absolutely is necessary sometimes.
But we better weigh our minds heavily before we make that decision to go and execute.
Now, when you think about the evolution of human beings, you think about how much safer it is today versus how it was thousands of years ago, do you ever foresee a time where war won't exist?
You know, people joke with me a lot about the robot wars and robots being able to accomplish wars.
I actually believe that thing will come.
I mean, we've got drones right now that are very capable.
Pretty soon we'll have land warfare robots that will be able to go in and clear buildings and make things happen.
And then will the enemy then have robots that will fight our robots at some point?
Yeah, and then at some point will that elevate to a point where we're not dealing with physical robots anymore But just the software behind the robots and now it's just a big sort of cyber warfare that that is that seems conceivable to me now Joe Don't mistake me for some kind of like a Sam Harris intellectual over here or that I'm gonna sit here and explain to you what the future of you know warfare from a technical perspective but from my from my Rudimentary thought process could it not elevate to a point
where we have robots fighting robots?
And then that eventually escalates to a point where it's some kind of cyber warfare whether it's not physical But it's just information based that does make sense to me that that could happen.
Probably people that don't know any people that don't people don't have good robots yet.
Yeah, and that's not gonna be fun for the people without robots right and We'll see where it goes from there.
I mean, I think that's just a surrender scenario, right if you've got a If let's say America has these robots that can just come in with ruthless Precision and take out bad guys and you know, you're gonna be at their mercy There's a fucking science fiction movie, right?
It's not the best structure because you have to make this thing up and run, whereas with wheels on it or treads or something, like a tank, a mini tank.
After it does this, it goes down these stairs, and then it gets to, I mean, it gets to this wall, like a hurdle, and it fucking bounces over this hurdle like it's nothing.
And just to bring this conversation back to where we were the further we go in this direction of Technology being in every part of our lives the further away we get from having to struggle with things and the bigger Hole there's gonna be in the hole that you sense and I sense which is if you're not struggling if you're not working if you're not fighting for something That's just gonna go further and further into the past and further and further down and people can have that hole to fill up somehow and Yeah,
Yeah, I mean we see that every day when you walk around America and you see people that are just you wonder how much longer they're gonna be able to survive and What happens if they if there's a fire and they have to run?
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They're not gonna make it around the corner to go to Disneyland Everybody's on a scooter.
And I have a friend who works at Disneyland, and he was telling me, like, he started working there 10 years ago, it was rare to see someone on a scooter.
And now they're all on scooters.
And they're not on scooters because they've got a broken leg.
Or they're old.
They're on scooters because they've eaten themselves into this unmanageable shape.
Well, again, even five years ago, if you wanted to eat yourself in a miserable shape, you had to walk to the grocery store to do that, which was at least some form of movement.
And now you just one-click on Amazon and you got the Cheetos in ultra-large size showing up at your front door in two hours.
I wonder when they're going to be able to figure out a way to compensate for all the shit, just some sort of a pill that figures out, or even CRISPR. I was listening to this Radiolab podcast where they're updating CRISPR. Do you know what CRISPR is?
For sure, they're doing some dark shit with people and this goddamn technology.
But they think that they're not only going to be able to use this gene editing tool, but they're going to be able to implant this gene editing tool into our genetics so that your own genes start doing the work of CRISPR for you.
So things like, they think it's going to take the place of antibiotics.
They think it's going to be able to edit out things like Alzheimer's, like whatever the gene is for Alzheimer's.
They'll be able to edit that out so Alzheimer's will no longer exist.
It's going to be really, really strange because people are going to have to make decisions.
And I always thought if you could just clone your body and then you let your body grow to be 20 years old, then you just take your brain out, put it inside that new body, then you're good to go.
I think they're going to be able to turn back the clock.
Because I think that when you think about cellular aging, like, well, what is it?
Your body's not reproducing.
Every cell in your body, except for your neurons, reproduces somewhere between every three to seven years or something like that, right?
Your neurons are the only things that you keep for the whole life.
And so what they're thinking is that as time goes on, your cells reproduce shittier and shittier, your telomeres shrink.
Okay.
Well, they'll be able to flip that around so that as time goes on, you'll be like Benjamin Buttons.
You'll start getting younger and younger, which will be really weird if they fuck it up and you start turning into a baby.
You know, you're like some 50-year-old and then all of a sudden you're like, dude, I'm 12 again.
This is not good.
Next year I'm going to be 11. If it goes backwards in that direction, if they can literally halt it, if they can take you and then, say if you're a 40-year-old woman, and they put you on a 20-year program, and they're like, well, in 20 years, instead of being 60, you're going to be 20. And this is how it's going to work.
Next year you're going to be 39. That's totally conceivable.
Yeah, you posted one of those the other day, and you said something like, you know, I don't know how you wrote it, but you said something like, and I watched it, and I was like, my sentiments exactly.
Yeah, I mean, Alex, you had Alex Arnold on him, and, you know, we, my family, we go up to Yosemite and stuff, so we are familiar, but you can see how he kind of edged into it, right?
Yeah.
And you start climbing, and you got ropes, and then you get really good at it, and then you're like, you know what, I can probably make it to there without a rope, and then next thing you know, you'll probably make it there, too, and then the next thing you know, you're climbing, you know, El Capitan with no rope, or Naftone with no rope, which is completely, you've been to Yosemite?
For him, it's not a big deal because he knows how strong he is and he knows what his limitations are.
So it doesn't...
It's like...
He's comfortable with it, right?
He's comfortable.
It's like, you know, someone walking on a balance beam that does it all the time, they're gonna be comfortable with it, and he's climbing stuff all the time, so he's more comfortable.
There's too much mass behind you that you're asking small limbs or small digits to control.
And then also, your heart has got to pump too much blood through that tissue.
There's like a point of diminishing returns when it comes to size.
That's one of the things you saw when you'd see Cain Velasquez fight guys.
Cain Velasquez has always been in that sweet spot of about 240. 240 to me is about as big as you want to get.
Because the guys over 240, man, they might fuck you up in the first few minutes, but you take them into that fourth and fifth minute of the first round, and then they're huffing and puffing, and then in the second round, they're getting their asses kicked.
And the Cain Velasquez storm was one of the more fascinating things to watch in all my years of the UFC, because he was a heavyweight that had the cardio of a lightweight.
Having that kind of sustained energy is a talent, just like some guys are super flexible, and some guys are super strong and explosive, and some guys just have that range.
And that's what a guy like Cain is, because Cain, like you said, I mean, for him to be able to get in there and go five rounds pushing around another guy that weighs 260 pounds, that's beast mode right there.
They'd post those videos though of him training in Russia, running with his buddies and swinging kettlebells, and he'd be like, yeah, this guy works hard.
And the thing that I think that he really had was he had a good...
His skill in my mind was that he was really good grapplers a really good striker, but he the way he mixed them together Yeah, you would see him just like hit somebody in the face and then judo throw them and then arm lock them or choke them It was all just so smooth I don't think anyone knew what to defend because if they defended one thing they were get if they defended it a Grappling move they were getting punched in the face if they defended a punt they were getting taken down and Yeah, he was something special, man.
And, you know, as much as I'm talking good about Fedor and his style and everything, let's face it.
What was the best about Fedor?
Was his attitude when he would just come in there with no emotions, just raise his hand, dead face.
You know, they'd introduce him, he'd just raise his hand, he'd destroy someone, and he would have the same expression on his face like before he fought.
He just had total absence of emotion that was, to me, that's what I always thought, yes.
And the other guy that comes to mind when we're thinking about old school fighters, that really, it wasn't just his skill set, which was unbelievable, but Sakuraba.
But that attitude of not giving a fuck is like that's what worked so well for him inside the inside the ring Yeah, well, I know we see this all the time with fighters We see with anybody that is gonna live out on the fringe like that.
I love it Yeah, and he's doing rope climbs and he's just that's all he does He's also being coached by John Donaher and he's a part of that Henzo Gracie crew in New York City and that Donaher death squad man you want to talk about a real like wizard of jiu-jitsu Donaher understand his Instagram posts are some of the very best Instagram posts on the internet and I got to follow him then.
Oh, you got to, man.
His breakdowns of certain techniques and matches and what went well and what went wrong and what's required of athletes and how to excel and the difference between an athlete in competition versus a difference in training.
That's one of his most recent things about putting yourself in bad positions and working on your weaknesses as opposed to just continuing to push your strengths.
The fighters that are good in training, but they're not good in their cage, and there's other fighters that kind of get beat up in training, but then when they get in the cage, they rise to the occasion.
I got to see that a bunch with a bunch of different fighters over the years that I trained with, and you'd say, ah, this guy's going to do okay, but then they'd get in the cage, and boom, they would just turn it on.
They'd elevate themselves.
And then some guys that are crushing everyone during training, they'd get in the cage, you know, UFC fight night or whatever, and they just can't They can't get it done that night, even though they're crushing people in the training.
And then for some reason, you know, once they faced other people that also have physical advantages but were tougher, they would just go, they'd just fall apart.
Yeah, you got to get that in and we got some guys at the jacket this guy at the gym right now who's just He's just a he's a mutant.
He's a mutant like he's so strong He I was it he shot on me the other day I sprawled on him and so he's on all fours and And he fights at 185. I'm on all fours and he picks me up with one hand, picks me up and slams me and gets across side.
And I said, bro, did you just like shot put me right there?
Think you can think you can I think you think you can you inoculate yourself to the stress It's just the mind so like you like the idea that these pitfalls in the mind are insurmountable I think that's ridiculous that seems to be more surmountable or more more More passable than physical problems because like physical problems like if you're 140 pounds and a guy's 240 pounds You're both equally talented and both equally driven boy.
You're kind of fucked Yeah, well that being said it is similar to what we talked about earlier Which is when you have somebody that's caught in their own mind They can't get the perspective to step out and be like, dude, just calm down.
There's nothing to freak out about.
You're going to go in there.
What if I lose?
If you lose, it's no big deal.
We'll get around it.
We'll train more.
It's no big deal.
They can't get over that.
And so you do get people that get trapped in their minds.
I mean, there's all kinds of fighters that have gone through that and never came out of it.
And if you really can think about it that way, every time, you know, I remember pretty much every time I've ever been humiliated on the mat.
Every time I've ever been like really manhandled and tapped, I remember them very well.
And I also remember like every time I rolled with like a real high-level black belt and got my ass handed to me, my training jumped up a notch.
It's that expression, the rub.
You train with someone who's way better, and you realize, whatever I thought was a high frequency, there's people that are operating several hundred RPMs faster than that, and I just hadn't encountered them.
I think that to be around that is so important.
If you ever train with a guy that trains in a small town, And all the people in the town is maybe like Purple Belt and coaches.
There's a certain RPM that they all operate in.
And if you come in and you're used to that fucking San Diego assassin RPM and they're like, what the fuck is this guy doing?
They're just not used to it.
But if you come from a place like that and you try to train at Henzo's or something like that, you're jumping into a fucking pit of killers.
And that's...
You know, that old expression, iron sharpens iron, could not be more true when it comes to jujitsu.
Yeah, well, also, there's something about freak wrestling strength that just...
It doesn't make any sense.
Like, I've rolled with some wrestlers before.
I'm like, okay, whatever you are, there's people, and then, like, there's, like, chimp people.
You're like a chimp person.
You know, like, they have...
Like, when your body is used to, from the time you're an early kid, throwing bodies around, like, your tendon strength and your ability to manipulate bodies is a very different kind of strength.
I mean, it might not translate to a 40-yard dash or...
Or sprints or, you know, lifting weights, but there's the physical ability to move bodies is very unusual.
Yeah, and you always have to be careful, too, because there's been plenty of wrestlers along the way that don't do well in MMA. Oh, They just they're great.
They're strong, but I think that's a mental thing I think they have like some limited factor in their brain where they go they just can't quite open their mind to jiu-jitsu They can't quite open their mind to striking they can't get out of that wrestler mentality of You know this I have to go as hard as I can right now because in MMA you can't go as hard as you can right now for the whole time you will run out of gas Especially with striking,
if you're boxing and sparring with people and you think you're just going to go in and do that, you're going to run into somebody who actually knows how to box and you're going to come home with headaches every night and you're going to get very discouraged.
It's a matter of who you're training with, too, as far as your trainers.
Who's coaching you and what methodology are they using and what mindset are they trying to impart on you as far as skill development?
Because there's so many people out there that just don't have a real clear philosophy.
They don't have a goal in terms of...
I want to work on footwork and avoiding certain shots and being able to move in better You know instead they're just trying to win every round or they're trying to you know push hard and then do you not get to the next level?
Which in my mind when we get past the athleticism we get past the mental overcoming of challenges and then in my opinion you get to the next level which is Creativity yeah, and that's when you get to McGregor right Johnny Bones Jones they're doing things that they're kind of making up yeah, and they're making up live as they go and I think that to me is is You know we kind of I think we saw with BJ Penn back in the day.
He was creative I think Fedor did it where he was he was doing creative things But I think to me that's that's where you go that one level higher is when you add the creative element to a guy that can take a and B and make F out of those things somehow and Yeah, and when you watch those guys, there's something about watching a Jon Jones or a Fedor or a Primetime BJ Penn.
You know, a lot of people don't know that he had a pretty bad staph infection just a few weeks before the first fight, and he was on some serious antibiotics, and that's one of the reasons why he was so drained.
Like, people are like, oh, he gassed out.
Like, if you've never taken antibiotics before, you don't know how fucking horrible it is on your gas tank.
It's one of the...
It's the weirdest thing ever.
It's like you could be in great shape.
You get on a run of antibiotics and your body's just...
You got a fucking thimble gas tank.
There's nothing left.
You got no energy.
For whatever reason, you just can't push yourself through stuff.
And I think that played a factor in that fight.
And here's the thing about McGregor.
You never heard a fucking peep about it.
If it wasn't for me talking about it, most people wouldn't even know.
Look, I mean, maybe he's gonna go full Bernard Hopkins, just fucking clinch and hit him in the clinch and tie him up and rough him up, and maybe that's the plan.
Lean on his neck, you know, just fight dirty.
Let him take points away.
Who gives a shit?
As long as you don't get disqualified.
Don't, like, stand in the middle of the ring and try to fucking chuck and jive with him.
But the other thing is, Floyd's not knocking a lot of people out, you know?
It's a good fight in terms of, like, to see what the fuck happens.
Somewhere in that range too, maybe more, probably more.
But I think that it's gonna be interesting.
First of all, Floyd's 40, almost 41. Floyd's maybe the best defensive boxer that's ever walked the face of the planet.
I mean, he's right up there.
I mean, you go back to Willy Papp and a lot of the guys from the old days and for sure Lomachenko today, but in terms of like overall performance against elite fighters over the course of his career, the guy's only been tagged hard like five or six times ever.
I mean, you look at him, he's throwing money around, driving Bentleys, but that fucking guy will get on the strip and he'll be running miles at 3 o'clock in the morning.
He opens up his gym at 3 o'clock in the morning and just does 15 rounds in the back.
He works hard.
I mean, I don't know if he works that hard anymore.
Andy Foster's the guy who runs the California State Athletic Commission, and he is such a fucking animal.
Andy Foster's one of the most important guys in terms of, like, commission, the guys who run commissions in MMA. He's, like, one of the most proactive, one of the most knowledgeable, and one of the very best.
Maybe the best.
He's so on the ball.
So he's pushed hard for these new weight classes and these new weight cutting regulations and such a fucking smart thing.
Yeah, I think it would be so helpful for all the head trauma that's happening if they took off the gloves and you had to either strike with an open palm or you had to pay the price because I might hit you twice before I broke my hand and now I'm going to be grappling with you and trying to take you down.
I don't think people understand that, that if someone just ducks their head down and you hit them with a straight punch to the forehead, you are very likely to break your hand.
I don't think you should be able to wrap your hands either.
That was interesting, and of course, we all heard, because I was a jiu-jitsu guy at that time, we were like, oh, he's only a purple belt, is what we were hearing, and they gave him his black belt just because he's doing this fight and blah, blah, blah, he's only a purple belt, and he comes out with just, what is it, 13 punches to the face, bop, bop, bop, and then he did the same thing to Vandalay, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, straight punches down the pipe.
Yeah, I always say that fighting in 1992 was theoretical.
And we you know some somebody will say something to me on the internet like hey, you know What about this martial art or whatever and I'm like what you what do you think of this?
I'm like you just no reason to theorize Not only do we know from the UFC we also have been and now a country at war for whatever 15 years So all of our guys been going overseas and doing the same stuff in combat so we know what works There's no there's no big question anymore, right?
It's not like I wonder what happens if you poke a guy in the eye.
I know we know what happens We know what happens Yeah, it's pretty obvious.
I had one of my buddies, a black belt guy named Jeff Higgs, old school jiu-jitsu guy, and he got told by a Tai Chi guy, you know, you can't take me down.
God and my buddy see that yeah, I mean that guy just got obliterated Yeah, and the only way you can ever actually know what would happen if someone punches you in the face is to train that way If you just have these ideas in your head that you're gonna stand in front of them This guy just oozing blood all over the place and he's getting up he's battered his nose is shattered wobbly and It's probably the first time he's ever been punched.
Maybe the MMA guy should have, if he had a little bit more foresight on what was going to happen, he should have come out and really done the whole respect and then the bow and then all this stuff.
And then after he defeated him, he should have helped him.
Maybe that would have helped him from a political standpoint.
Yeah, that's one of my new things that I tell people with jiu-jitsu because I used to say like jiu-jitsu is magic because it kind of is you know when you know jiu-jitsu You can do things that are almost magic, right?
But then when you're teaching somebody for the first time almost like look it's not magic It's you know I was showing somebody the other day of you know elbow escape or something from the mount and the guy's like you know he's he's it's really hard to do because he keeps pulling my arm away and You know?
And I was like, yeah, it's a fight you're in.
It's not magic.
You have to fight against the other person.
It's another human.
I just told him what to do and I told you what to do.
Yeah, well, down in San Diego, I don't know what it was 10 years ago, 15 years ago, they had that Heaven's Gate thing where all these people put on those purple shoes.
And it shows you again, you know, now we're, you know, you're talking about the human mind is just so complicated and complex that it's grasping for something to believe in and some people aren't going to believe in anything.
Yeah, I always want to try to see things from other people's perspective, and it's hard because the brain wants to go, fuck this guy.
This guy's no shit.
You're right, dude.
This guy's wrong.
But you always gotta, like, pause and think.
I mean, again, I hate to bring this back up, but that could easily be what's also going on with the flat earth thing.
Because they have this idea in their head, and then someone says, you know, there's no photos of the Earth other than composites.
If there really was a round Earth, you'd be able to see a whole...
And they go, oh, actually, there's a photo taken every 10 minutes from 22,000 miles away of the full Earth.
Well, that's not true!
Well, that's fake!
And they get into this thing, and they get into this thing because they don't want to ever stop and pause and look at the way they're thinking versus the way other people are thinking and go, okay, did I get myself in a fucking trap here?
Did I get myself into an intellectual trap where I'm supporting an idea that's not true, and now I'm reinforcing that in my head, and I'm tightening up all my borders and trying to figure out a way to not let new ideas in and to reinforce my old ideas?
You know, your podcast with Jordan Peterson the other day, he kind of brought that up, which I think, by the way, if anyone hasn't listened to that podcast, that's got to be one of the best podcasts that I've ever heard.
And he's talking about the fact that sometimes people, if they accept those new ideas, all of a sudden what they've done with their life for the past 20 years gets thrown out the window.
Yeah, and that's got to be really hard and immediately when I was listening to that I was thinking to myself Yeah, that's that's what happened in the 90s when somebody that had been studying some traditional martial art god bless them They were doing the best they could but when all of a sudden some blue belt in jiu-jitsu could come in there and roll them up and choke them out and there was nothing they could do about it and they either had to do one of two things say Okay,
I'm gonna start training this other new thing that I don't understand or block it out, which was very hard to do with Jiu Jitsu I mean that's the good thing about MMA and about UFC is it was like You can deny it all you want, but you have to face this guy on the mat That's the only way you can and when you do that you're gonna lose whereas with all these kind of intellectual arguments A lot of times, it's just I say, you say.
I say, you say.
And if you tell me, you know, if I'm telling you that every picture of the earth is, whatever, CGI, and that's what I'm going to hold, and I'm not going to let it go, and how are you going to prove to me otherwise?
And every single picture you show me, I say, no, that's CGI. And you show me another picture, and I say, no, that's CGI. We're never going to get anywhere.
I had to go through three of those, man, because I started out with Taekwondo, which was, it's not a good martial art for fighting.
By itself, it's been too many holes in it But it's a great martial art for throwing kicks and when I went from that to kickboxing I realized how easy it was to get punched in the face and I was like wow And so then I started really studying boxing and I was like man my my ideas of like how well I can fight are so overestimated I'm not nearly as if I'm a good at Taekwondo and I'm not good at fighting.
And then I started doing Muay Thai, and I'm like, oh, well, fucking leg kicks.
Jesus Christ.
Leg kicks and knees to the body and the clench.
I was like, oh, fuck.
There's so much I can...
I'm so fucked.
You know, because I got really good at something that kind of sucks on its own.
And then from there, jujitsu.
Where I was just getting raped.
I was like, at least with kickboxing, I could throw kicks.
I could move around.
I could try not to get my legs kicked.
I could try to be more mobile.
But when I was going into jujitsu as a white belt, I was just getting fucking mauled.
Yeah, and there's certain positions, like if you get your back taken or something like that, where you're almost 100% dead.
Yeah, but I think that there's parallels to that in life, because if you look at life and you look at the way you're behaving and the way you're thinking and the way you choose to accept ideas and the way that you choose to view the world, if you're so rigid in your ideology that you're unwilling to accept Any sort of new information and new data or any sort of contrary data or information, like someone who's telling you something that you don't agree with, but you're going, okay, well, all right, well, what's your perspective?
Instead of just agreeing or disagreeing with them and arguing and going to war with them, try to take it in.
Try to go, okay, well, what is this guy saying that has merit?
Where's this guy coming from?
Or even if I totally disagree with him, what makes him think this?
It's like, what's going on in your head that you think that we should take everyone's money and distribute it equally across the country?
There's people that believe that.
That everyone who's ever been successful somehow or another got it through stealing, and then what we need to do is take all the money in the country and redistribute all this wealth so everybody gets $50,000.
I might argue with it, or I might see your point, or I might think that if you did do this, but you still...
If you did this right now, this is what I think, if you did this right now, if you took all the money from all the billionaires and all these fucking rich tycoons, all of them, and took all their money and distributed it equally amongst everybody in the country, How long would it take if you just allowed normal capitalism to flourish after that?
How long would it take before the levels went right back to where they are?
The way I explained that concept to my children was I said, okay, here's what communism is, because this is what you're talking about.
I said, my kids are really hard workers and they do well in school.
And I said, you know, you study hard for your test, right?
Let's say you get a 90, 95 on your test.
And then what happens with communism is there's another kid in your class, who's the dumbest kid?
Billy?
Okay, Billy's getting a whatever, a 30. So what we're gonna do is you're gonna take the test, and then we're gonna take whatever points from you and give them to Billy, so that you both get a D. And that's what we're gonna do.
Now that's what communism is.
Now, if I do that, is that gonna inspire you to work any harder?
So we gotta be really careful that the amount of, you know, wealth that you spread around, if you spread it all around, you're gonna end up with no one wanting to achieve anything.
Yeah, like I hear Bernie Sanders talk and he seems like a really nice guy.
And he seems like he really has his mind in the right place and his heart in the right place.
This idea of democratic socialism.
I see him talking to people.
I'm like, well, that's definitely better than being greedy.
It's definitely better than being corrupted by the banks.
It's definitely better than being corrupted by Wall Street and giving these bullshit, phony speeches for hundreds of thousands of dollars and fucking over people for profit.
But...
Does that shit, but does socialism really work?
It doesn't seem to work.
It doesn't seem to, like, work in terms of, like, human motivation.
Well the concept of income inequality is always strange because it's like well Okay, but you should you make the same amount of money for a job that doesn't have the same amount of importance and significant?
I'll just go ahead and straight-up answer for you.
No, you shouldn't if if you got paid after 10 years of medical school the same that you got paid to drive a bus After you busted your ass and worked hard and had to study and do all this stuff to go to medical school and by the way You built up a bunch of debt trying to go to school.
Hey, why wouldn't you just become a bus driver?
Motivation shouldn't be financial your motivation should be helping people You gotta be we we have to be careful that and and of course I There are people that legitimately need help in the world.
There's people with disabilities.
There's people with mental problems.
And we've got to be compassionate and take care of those people to the best of our ability.
But we definitely need to watch out for, hey, let's steal everything from the people that worked hard and give it to the people that didn't.
I wish I knew all the details of this, but there was a Native American tribe, and somebody I'm sure will tell me what it is, but there was a Native American tribe in Northern California that when all the Native American tribes got designated Native American tribes and they got you know Here's what you're gonna get and this is your tribe and this is these guys for whatever reason they didn't get it They didn't get designated as a Native American tribe.
They just got they got passed over no one noticed them and Now all the members that tribe like completely dominate they run everything financially they own everything up there They kind of kicked ass right And it's because they had to and I think a lot of times when when people just get given stuff It becomes very very difficult for them to say you know what I'm gonna go out and work hard You know am I gonna bust it's a classic example of hey am I gonna bust my ass at McDonald's for eight bucks an hour 40 hours
a week or whatever 30 hours a week for nine bucks an hour I'm gonna work that hard doing that or am I just gonna take my welfare check which is equal to or almost equal to for sitting around doing nothing Yeah, that's not a hard question to answer for many many people.
Yeah, I'm gonna sit around and do nothing So we had to be careful about it's hard.
Yeah, it is hard It's it is a natural inclination that people have to do the least amount to just be as comfortable as possible or as lazy as possible You know, I think your your statement that you always say discipline equals freedom is People should have that shit tattooed on their thigh.
You should look at that when you get up in the morning and put your underwear on.
That shit is so important because if you do have discipline and if you do go out there and get the things done that you need to get done, you have freedom and you feel better and you feel relaxed because you don't have that balloon hovering over you.
That balloon of, you know, just knowing that you're not doing your best, knowing that you're not out there hustling.
And if you just get a free check every month, and you don't really have to go out there and kick ass, you can kind of get by.
Boy, that doesn't...
It's not...
It's not conducive to lighting that fire under your ass that you need to be successful.
You know, there is a concept of universal basic income that's kind of interesting, though.
Because this idea is that once we get automation and once we get artificial intelligence, there's going to be...
So many jobs that don't exist anymore that we got to figure out what to do with all these people.
And the idea is if you just have your basic needs taken care of, like not enough so that you could actually thrive, but just where you have food and shelter.
How many people would then pursue their actual love and what they're actually passionate about?
And would it be the same?
There's tests they're doing on it now.
They're trying to find out, would the same amount of people be successful?
Would more be successful or would less?
Like, how many people would pursue their dream if they knew they didn't have to worry about starving to death?
If they just got money every month, they knew where they were going to sleep and eat, and then they could just go and do whatever the fuck they wanted to do?
Yeah Then the question is like where like when a guy like Bernie Madoff or some crazy Wall Street character When they just move some money around and make money like okay, how much you getting out of that?
Where's that coming from?
Who's whose money was that like where's that go?
Where's that going and has it how does it exist and Well, Bernie's a bad example, right?
And I think, again, going back to the original conversation we started off with today, I think the weirder it gets and the further we get away from primal sort of existence of hunting down food and fighting against other tribes, I think the further we get away from that, the more we're gonna have to reach back to it and ground ourselves to it.
And that's why we're gonna have to reach back to this physicality at some point.
And it's not just physicality.
Like you're saying, it's a mental struggle, too.
It's trying to achieve things.
It's trying to win.
It's trying to be competitive.
If I'm just sitting there and I don't have a job anymore and I just get, you know, $12,000 a month and that's enough for me to pay my food and pay my rent, I'm just gonna sit there and play video games.
I think it's just in overcoming and enduring and figuring things out, like even writing a book.
I'm sure you're feeling like you have a new book out, The Way of the Warrior Kid, and I'm sure the feeling that you get when you write a book and complete it is, I fucking did it.
I made that happen.
I didn't want to get through all those days.
There was a lot of times I didn't want to write, but I got through it, and here it is.
There's a satisfaction of accomplishing goals and of overcoming Obstacles and problems, and they don't have to be physical.
I think there's mental requirements that we have as well.
And the reason I wrote it is because, first of all, all the things that we're talking about right now, They're happening even more to kids.
I mean, you have kids, right?
iPads, iPhones, they're sucked into technology, and there's nothing completely wrong with that, but if they get sucked into technology and they don't ever come out of it, you've got issues.
Yeah.
And being a kid, if you remember, and a lot of people forget this, being a kid is hard.
Being a kid is hard.
And in this particular book, there's a kid.
His name is Mark.
He's in fifth grade.
He's got kind of the typical issues that a fifth grader has.
He can't do any pull-ups.
So in gym class, when they're doing pull-ups, he's getting made fun of.
He's doesn't know his times tables which you should absolutely know in fifth grade, but he doesn't know him So he's thinks he's stupid now.
He doesn't know how to swim because he never learned and He's when they go on the field trip to the to the lake.
He doesn't know how to swim So everyone's having a good time and he can't and eventually they call him out on it And finally he's getting picked on by the big bully Kenny Williamson.
Goes home, and when he gets home, his mom reminds him that his uncle, Uncle Jake, is coming to stay with him for the summer.
Uncle Jake is a guy that was a SEAL in the SEAL teams and he's just got out of the SEAL teams and he's gonna go to college in the fall But he's gonna spend the summer with his sister and with his nephew Mark and so you know that the Navy SEAL shows up Uncle Jake shows up and he sees his little nephew and he says hey, you know They're actually staying in the same room and he says hey, you know what are you gonna do tomorrow?
You know you wanna go play some ball you want to go for a swim and the kid says you know like I I don't want to play ball.
It's not fun and and I don't know how to swim and I don't know these breaks down, you know getting picked on the whole nine yards and his uncle says Okay, so you can't swim you don't know your times tables You can't do any pull-ups and you're getting picked on we can change all those things We just have to get a plan put it together and make it happen So puts him on the workout program teaches him how to study teaches him how to swim teaches him jiu-jitsu If it was only that easy Yeah,
and what's what's good is It's not as hard as people think and I think that's why the books getting a strong reaction because there's actually pragmatic methods in there on For instance, I went through all this stuff not knowing not knowing times tables I went through that with my daughter my oldest daughter didn't know her times tables and what she thought was She's stupid.
She thought I'm stupid.
I don't know my times tables other kids know them I don't know them and I said to her, you know, she's crying and You know, she's in whatever third or fourth grade crying.
What's wrong?
I'm stupid.
Why do you think you're stupid?
I don't know my times tables.
Well, how much have you studied them?
I haven't studied them.
Well, how do you think you're gonna know them if you haven't studied them?
What do you mean study them?
Boom make flashcards an hour later?
She knows our times tables.
It's that and so I actually go through that method in the book How do you learn how to fight you're getting picked on how do you learn how to fight?
You go down to your jujitsu school, and you start learning jujitsu.
And you and I both know, if you know jujitsu in a grade school fight in sixth grade, you're going to win 100% of the time, right?
So you learn that.
Learn how to swim.
How do you do that?
And his big thing is he's afraid of water.
Well, why are you afraid of the water?
How do you overcome that fear?
How do you overcome fear?
You've got to inoculate yourself to it.
You start off wading in the water, then you dunk your head, then you lay down and you feel the water all over your body, and then eventually you step in, and then eventually you start to dog paddle, and then eventually you start to swim, and then eventually you jump off the bridge.
So these are real things.
That's how you overcome fear.
And that one I got from my middle daughter, who wanted to be in the school play, But she got stage fright and so she would freak out every time she would have to go in front of a crowd So I said okay, we're gonna inoculate you to being in front of people first You're gonna sing in front of me You know and then you're gonna sing in front of me and mom and then you're gonna sing in front of me and mom and your brothers and sisters and then you're gonna sing in front of you know our friends that are gonna come over there's gonna be ten of them and then you're gonna sing in front of you know all of the people that we know
at a block party and then you're gonna get out and you're gonna do your rehearsal and she did it and she got inoculated and I'll tell you right now she's not afraid of anything that girl and so that's the same thing that that he goes through in the book overcoming his fear of water and He inoculates to it, gets used to it, and then finally the final step is you have to go, right?
You can't overcome every part of the unknown.
You have to, there's always going to be some unknown in doing something that you've never done before.
And then what do you do when you've prepared as much as you can, and you've done all the training that you can do?
Then you've got to step up and you've got to go.
So that's what the book's about.
And I wrote it so that kids can apply these things that I learned, both in the SEAL teams and in raising my own kids, they can apply them to their life.
And the reaction's been great.
It's been great to see all these kids reading it and all the great feedback of kids doing push-ups and pull-ups and training and going down and starting jujitsu and making flashcards.
And one of the cool things about being a kid is, well, it's a struggle in that you haven't really achieved any success yet in anything, but what you don't realize is that you've got all these possibilities to get good at stuff.
Once you become really good at something, one of the real problems is people don't like to get out of their comfort zone and become a beginner again.
And it's one of the beautiful things about life is humbling yourself with something new.
Humbling yourself and learning stuff.
And kids, they don't have that lesson yet, so everything is terrifying.
But once they do learn it, if you could teach a kid how to get good at one thing.
Like one of the things that led me to get good at stand-up comedy and all the other things that I did is that I got really good at martial arts young.
So I knew, okay, I sucked when I first started.
I remember sucking, but I remember I kept working and I get good at it because I focused and I put the time in.
Well, if I just do that without anything else, I mean, you've learned that you can make a path.
So in this book, you know, Uncle Jake is the character, and he actually addresses that in the end of the book because Uncle Jake leaves.
And the kid says, hey, you know, you're not going to be around anymore.
Who's going to lead me?
Who's going to help me train?
And he says, you didn't need me then, and you don't need me now.
You know what you need to do.
You know it's going to take hard work.
And the other thing that I did in this book, which is...
I played around with the idea but his dad the kid's dad is not really present and and the reason I did that is because a lot of kids these days don't have a dad around and he the only thing he says about his dad I put one line in there about his dad Which was, you know, he says, my dad's gone a lot for his job and stuff.
That's the only line.
So you have an idea that the kid knows his dad and knows that he's out there.
He's working or doing whatever he's doing.
But there's a lot of kids out there that don't have a dad.
They don't have an Uncle Jake.
And that was, you know, another reason why I wrote the book.
Because kids need to see and learn.
You know, if you wouldn't have done martial arts, who would have told you that, hey, if you work hard and you train, you're going to get good at this.
That would have...
If you wouldn't have done that with martial arts, you wouldn't have done it with stand-up comedy, you wouldn't have done it with the rest of your career.
You would have said, you know, you would have gotten on the stage the first time for stand-up comedy.
You wouldn't have made anyone laugh.
You would have walked off, said I suck, and gone to get a job, you know, down at 7-Eleven or whatever.
You know, that's...
Whereas if somebody said, look, man, of course you suck.
You just started.
Of course you suck.
Of course you don't know your times tables.
How would you know them?
You're not born with that information.
Of course you're not good at stand-up comedy.
You just did it for the first time.
You've got to learn how to do it.
Of course you're not good at stand-up fighting and taekwondo.
You've never done it before.
So you've got to learn these things.
You've got to put in the work.
You learn that lesson through martial arts.
A lot of kids don't get that opportunity.
I'm trying to give them that opportunity to learn it with this book.
If I don't do anything new for a long time, I feel stagnant.
But when I start doing something new, especially something that I'm not good at, so I start thinking about it a lot, I start obsessing about it a lot, I get invigorated.
Like when our first book came out, It's a leadership book, right?
And everyone thinks, hey, you know, it's another leadership book.
And then when you read it, people go, oh, wait a second.
This is like a new thought.
It's a new thought I haven't seen before.
And we have these, you know, we have these things that we do where we just bring people in.
Like, usually we go out and work with a company.
We go out with one company and we go out and we work with a company.
But we found that there was some smaller companies or people that couldn't afford to bring us in so we said okay What are we gonna do about that?
So we made this thing up called the muster where we open it up to the public to come and you know Come and spend two days going through all these principles and it's the same thing that you're talking about They say it's a challenge.
It's new thought It's thinking about something from a different light people that have been in leadership positions for five years ten years fifteen years and they go oh Oh, okay, I can apply this new methodology that I haven't seen, hadn't thought about before.
So to continue to grow and learn is just so important across the board.
Oh man like your endurance jumps up quick like within a few weeks I was able to like way past areas like I've got this this trail that's about 2.7 miles through the hills like real steep hills and There are some spots where I was just fucking dying and now I can get through them I can get through them and get to the top and I'm still dying but I'm dying less and Are you timing yourself, too?
And also, when you reach your physical limitations, right?
So you reach your physical limitations on something, you know, like you're going to get down to a six-minute mile, let's say.
And then for you to take it past a six-minute mile, you're going to have to, like, stop lifting kettlebells, get all skinny.
You know, you'd go to a point where now that'd be your sole focus.
And I know I'm guessing you wouldn't want to do that.
I know I wouldn't want to do that.
And so for me, I'm always jumping around from kind of from goal to goal.
Right?
Like, maybe I'll be doing pull-ups, heavy pull-ups for a while.
I'll be doing pull-ups, pull-ups, pull-ups, trying to get up my max pull-ups.
And then I get to a point where, okay, now I'm not going to, it's going to take every bit of focus in my life to get from 58 pull-ups to 62. I don't want to do that.
So, I'm cool with 52, and now I'm going to start working on my deadlift, or I'm going to start training jiu-jitsu more, and I'm just constantly...
I hate to say it because not everyone can make that happen.
People live in cramped quarters, but man, if you can even just get a pull-up bar and maybe a set of rings, you can do so much and then you grab yourself one kettlebell.
But if you have a pull-up bar in your house, you can do pull-ups, you can do push-ups, you can do squats, you can do all kinds of burpees and everything else, sit-ups and gut work, and you can pretty much get your whole body in really good shape with that one piece of equipment.
I do write them down because I kind of log what I'm doing, but I'll put down, you know, whatever exercise I'm going to do or whatever bunch of exercises I'm going to do, and I'm logging down what I'm, you know, what my times are if I'm going for time or what the weights are if I'm going for weight.
I'm pretty I heard this the other day, so I'm gonna say it They said Arnold was an instinctual trainer, so I I do that somewhat You know I'm not like looking at a book and I don't plan out for three weeks or a month in advance of exactly what I'm gonna do that day because that day I might go damn I you know I'm not feeling that Type of workout and I'm I need to not do it.
I'm gonna do something else So I use my what my body's telling me somewhat That's not to say that I go hey, I don't feel like doing anything to do today So I'm not gonna do it because that's actually a rule that I have if I don't feel like doing something today I feel like I need a rest I'll do something that day and put the rest off till the next day make yourself do it today and And then if you still need it tomorrow, you can take a rest.
Well, that's one thing that I try to impart on people, too, that strength and conditioning training, particularly strength training, it protects the joints.
I think that is why I have been relatively, knock on wood, injury-free.
Because two reasons.
I work out all the time and I never take any significant amount of time off.
I never say I'm not gonna work out or I never just fall into a hey I went two months or even two weeks or even five days For me to for me to not work out for five days.
There was some kind of like something happened I was like majorly sick or I was even if I'm traveling I'll still get it done But I think that that consistency your body just is used to it and you don't you don't Get hurt as often and you're like a hardcore metal guy, right?
The other guy, the guy that founded that band, the Cro-Mags, he's actually a buddy of mine.
He's a jiu-jitsu guy.
He's a black belt in jiu-jitsu, but he's had a completely insane life as well.
His name is Harley Flanagan, and his life's been completely Insane isn't it doesn't even really doesn't there's hardly I actually it was interesting because I just had him on on my podcast and It's it was a different it was a different you know guest for me a different genre and People you know first of all the guy you know people that listen my podcast They
expect a certain type of podcast, right?
I'm gonna talk about leadership I'm gonna talk about the military and all of a sudden I bring in this guy who's been a complete maniac and I mean he's done, you know, he was Drugs, you know drug sex rock and roll.
It's basically been his whole life and since he was like 10 years old He was playing in a punk rock band in New York City.
But it was interesting, because I had him on the podcast, and it was interesting to have people that listen to it, that listen to my podcast, which is very different.
You know, you bring in basically all kinds, you get all kinds of, such a completely wide variety of people in here.
My guests have been basically War guys, right?
Brian Stan, Tim Kennedy, Jody Mittick, who's a Canadian sniper, wounded real bad in Afghanistan.
I had a guy named Colonel William Reeder on there, who was a pilot in Vietnam, got shot down, and got shot down twice actually, captured in Vietnam, was in captivity for a year, and he's talking about He's in a bamboo cage with his legs shackled and he wakes up in the middle of the night because the rats are eating his wounds.
I mean, I'm bringing on guys that are just talking about, not only talking about heavy subjects, but they're also talking about it from, you know, a very...
Positive perspective of life, right?
I mean, is there anyone more positive than than Brian Stan?
That guy's just like a like a just an American hero, right?
And so then I all of a sudden out of left field I bring on Harley Flanagan and he tells his story was really interesting to me to have people's reactions and There was a couple people that were like, oh, you know This was a real letdown for you to bring them on but if you hear his story you listen to the whole podcast I mean here's a guy who Who you can hear it in his voice like his his heart is broken over some of the things that he's been through his life losing his father his father was a was a heroin addict and in his father Died
burned alive in a dumpster as he lit a fire to try and keep himself warm.
That's how his dad died Buried his mom.
I mean it's just it's just a tragic story, but My point is that the even though I had a very few people that were like all that was you know You shouldn't have he swore literally.
Hey, he swore a bunch on the podcast That's inappropriate or whatever and then I what was really that that was kind of well That's that's kind of too bad to hear hear someone say that that they would have that viewpoint But what was really cool was all these other people that are very straight laced kind of Kind of middle road American people that that listen to podcasts were like dude Thanks for having that guy on what a heart what a guy and it's good for me to know about that stuff and It's good for to hear someone that's been through the depths
of drug addiction and hell Come back out of it and do all right and and again from my perspective I think that my Interaction with those kind of people when I was growing up which I certainly had you know I was a young kid going to New York and Boston going to hardcore shows and all that It'll let me see part of the world that most people don't really see and so when I got in the military I got I was kind of used to dealing with people that people aren't used to dealing with and I think it helped me out a lot so Is it a hard
And it's a lot, you know, my podcast is a lot different than yours because I'm going deep on some subject that I'm actually going to like, I have to study and prepare for.
And it's not interacting with another person most of the time.
Most of the time I'm interacting with history.
So, it's harder for me to prepare.
Now, of course, you've been preparing for this podcast for 50 years, right?
I mean, that's what you've been mentally preparing for getting your experiences and your background.
But I have to, like, dive into stuff.
And so it is hard.
My point is, yes, it's hard for me to do a podcast a week.
But is it hard to manage expectations, which is what I was getting after?
Because once you establish, like, a fan base...
Sometimes they have this idea in their head of what the podcast should be to them like what they want out of it And then they they can express that they don't like where you're going like I don't like that you brought this Harley guy on this guy's not what I like I like straight laced military guys who don't swear this guy's a fucking nutty dude jumps around on stage and the my answer to that is No,
and I'll tell you why From the beginning of, you know, when you said, it was you and Tim Ferriss, you know, both you guys said you should do a podcast, and I said, okay, cool.
If you don't know what that is, the My Lai Massacre.
You know, people talk about these atrocities that Americans commit all the time.
Americans don't actually commit atrocities all the time.
But we have committed some heinous atrocities, and this one is well-documented.
Vietnam, the My Lai Massacre.
It was a company of soldiers going into a village, and they raped, murdered, killed people.
Around 500 people just cold blood.
I mean it's it's heinous.
It's awful Probably the hardest podcast that I've done because I'm a patriotic guy and here I am talking about You know American soldiers doing heinous acts to innocent people and and so and I've done that I did I did a podcast about the genocide in Rwanda which was if you don't know anything about that two tribes and It's very hard for Americans to understand this the difference between these two tribes is nothing It's just two tribes.
They speak the same language.
They have the same they look the same They have the same religion which by the way the religion was Catholicism because they'd been like converted to Catholicism Well, they went on a rampage and the Hutus which was one tribe murdered 800,000 Tutsis in a hundred days with machetes with machetes So I've covered these dark and horrible things on my podcast and I and I don't even Know really
a hundred percent why other than this thought in the back of my mind That I've always had which is that you have to kind of understand the darkness of the world in order to appreciate The good in the world and that's why it was really interesting to hear you talking to Jordan Peterson Because he covered that part,
you know, he was saying look man is Got a dark side and you won't become a good person unless you understand your dark side and and it's interesting for me because Jordan Peterson is clearly a Highly intellectual and academic guy and I'm not right.
I'm I'm a nug right I joined the military after high school and and yet all so many of the things he says when he says them I say oh, yeah Well, that's the same thing I stumbled upon he came across that reading the the French philosopher or whatever that's where he comes I came across it in life and So it's very interesting to me when I hear him say look there's darkness in the world and there's evil in the world and We have to face that and and as soon as I heard him saying that on the podcast I'm like well That's that's what I think and I can't give you the philosophical basis
for it like he can but I can tell you what I've lived through and I can tell you that if you don't understand the fact that there's darkness in the world and that people human beings are capable of evil things and If you don't understand that you're not gonna understand the the first of all you're not gonna understand what you need to look out for in the world and what we need to be aware of as a society and As a as a race of humans,
but also you're not gonna appreciate things in the world that are Beautiful and good and positive.
So with the podcast, I'm not doing it to make people happy.
I'm not doing it to make people listen.
I'm not even doing it to make people listen.
I'm doing it because it's things that I've lived through.
It's things that I want to understand better and I'm gonna keep doing what I'm doing and if people like it, then that's awesome and if people don't want to listen to it, that's cool too.
Well, at least from my personal experience, listening to guys like Jordan Peterson or listening to yourself or listening to anybody talk about really deep, important subjects, even if you know what they're saying to be true, it reinforces it in your own mind and maybe even opens up new doors of comprehension.
Jordan certainly did that with me.
When I was listening to him talk, he was saying some things like talking about dragons and dragons have gold.
I was like, whoa, Jesus Christ.
He was hitting some notes about human psychology and the reason why we behave in certain ways and the pitfalls of these certain types of behavior that I absolutely knew he was right.
And maybe I'd even thought about them before, but seeing them reinforced so eloquently and seeing it expressed so articulately, it really sparked life in my mind.
Yeah, and even, you know, he was talking about being a warrior, right?
And how these guys in modern times, we don't spend time being a warrior.
If you and I were living 500 years ago, you and I would both be battle-scarred and...
We would be used to that lifestyle people aren't used to that lifestyle now They've kind of forgotten what that feels like and so I'm that was my life I mean that was my life was to prepare for war and go fight war that was my whole life and so for me to look back on it now and hear Jordan Peterson to say like That's normal.
That's okay.
That's expected.
And it makes me say, okay, I understand now where, you know, kind of part of, I understand myself better when I hear him say, oh yeah, this is normal for guys to go out and fight wars.
This is the warrior mentality.
And when you come back and you tell the truth about it, People will react to that in a positive way.
That's what he was saying about you.
He's like, hey, look, you're not some academic sitting there reading a book and talking about what you're reading in the book.
You're like, no, I'm a fighter.
I fight.
I've been through this stuff.
I've had physical challenges.
That's why people are listening to what you're saying.
Because you have that warrior mentality in your life.
Well, I think that guys like Jordan Peterson, I think that anybody that can tap into those truths that we know, you know, I just don't think we hear them enough.
I think we're inundated with so much stupid shit every day.
It's so hard to get to any like real substantial truths that will positively affect both your outcome and your outlook on life.
And I think guys like you guys like Tim Ferriss is putting on all these amazing podcasts Jordan Peterson all these people that can express things to someone like This podcast literally has changed my life.
I mean it's changed my thinking It's I'm a totally different person than I was when I first started this podcast because talking to all these interesting and fascinating people And wise people.
It's been like having some crazy crash course in a million different disciplines and a bunch of different conversations.
And seeing the pitfalls of some people's thinking and being around people where you see the holes in their minds.
The way they express themselves or the way they process information made me recognize the holes in my own processing and the way I used to communicate with people.
I'm a better conversationalist now.
And it all comes from just having these intense conversations.
This whole podcast thing is something that I never expected in life.
I never expected it was going to come along.
When it came along, I never expected it would be something that I would do.
And I never expected it would be something I consume as much as I do I don't even have radio anymore in my fucking car.
If I listen to music, it's my music that I get off of iTunes, or it's something that someone, like a new band, that someone tells me or turns me on to, but I don't listen to anybody I don't listen to satellite radio.
Kind of know them too like they have these shared experiences with me and I talked about this on that on that podcast about Rwanda They talk about the fact that the first thing they do in a revolution In a coup is they want to take control of the radio and there's this great piece in there where he says they're talking about the fact that with with TV and You have to take what the image on the screen in your mind your eyes process it and then it goes into your brain With reading you take those
words and they go in through your eyes and it processes them and it goes into your brain, but with audio There's no filter the words are going directly into your brain.
They're unfiltered And so that's why I think this podcast audio format is so powerful because the people that are listening to this right now, they're sitting in the room with us.
They're here with us.
And when I'm recording my podcast, I'm actually talking to them and they're there.
And when I go out and I meet people...
You can absolutely feel like, hey, and the little inside jokes, because even though I'm talking about how dark and evil my podcast is, but we have a good time, too, and we have episodes that are funny, and we talk about regulars.
We talk about jiu-jitsu and food and everything else working out, and we have fun, too.
And all those little inside jokes.
People will say the inside jokes to me that I've never met this person before, but he knows exactly what I'm talking about.
And...
And so it's it's a very very powerful medium that I think got skipped over and You know we went from radio just completely absorbed into TV and then absorbed into the internet and now all of a sudden we got to this other side where we're back to this thing that there's some reason why people used to sit around that radio and Listen to those radio shows back in the day even I did you know when I was a kid for whatever reason I I liked radio shows.
I would sit there and listen to Dr. Demento, and they'd have those little radio shows and those skits, and that was a powerful medium, and I knew it back then.
And so for me, like you, as soon as you and Tim were saying, you should do your own podcast, I was like, absolutely, I'm going to do this.
My goal is that when people...
Press play on my podcast.
I want them to, like, be putting their headphones on and, like, stretching their neck a little bit, pressing play, and then just going, okay, this is...
So it's you and him and that's it like there's there's not like a whole team if you had a the the audience that you have I know that you guys are shit ton of downloads now So the that kind of audience if you were on a radio show you'd have a successful radio show So you'd be in a studio somewhere.
You'd have a network behind you.
You'd have to have production meetings You'd have to have a bunch of people that would tell you what the I was gonna say I'd have people telling me What I could and couldn't say.
And, you know, I know we're leaving money on the table, because right now, all these advertisers that come to us, and they say, hey, can you talk about this?
And can you talk about that?
And they want to pay us money?
And I'm just like, nope, we're not doing it.
We have one.
We have Onnit.
Because it's your boys, your company, and you helped me in the beginning.
So, and...
Good products, but that's it.
That's the only advertisements we have.
Not doing anybody else.
And so there's no one that can tell me what to do.
And I just think that people get locked up in this, it's like sort of like almost like a trance of the way you're thinking.
They're in Jocko's mind.
You're talking and they're thinking how you're thinking.
They're like allowing themselves to be taken on this journey, whether they're in their car, whether they're at the gym, they're absorbed in your thoughts in a very unique way.
And because of the fact there's not a whole lot of other people contributing and entering into the picture, you know, like producers and network executives and advertising agencies, and look, we've looked at the stats, and Jocko, you've got to talk more about this, and You know what I mean?
You could get lost in analytics and never find your true voice.
But podcasts, it's almost entirely your true voice.
I don't want to say low tech.
It's not low tech, but it's low...
There's a small amount of voices.
You know, in terms of like each individual podcast, it's just your voice and it may be like mine, it's mine and the guest and whoever else comes in.
And that's where you, I mean, Singular Visions is what makes some, it's like, there's a reason why Netflix does so well and the reason why a lot of these HBO shows do so well is because they leave those fucking people alone.
Actually told that to my publisher about you know my publisher I was like you know what the best thing about my podcast is is that no I can do whatever I want to do I can do whatever I want to do and that's what makes it it's a it's very very liberating there's no I mean you write a book and You know they're someone's gonna edit that thing and they're gonna change this and they're gonna adjust that they want the cover to look like this the podcast is It is just you and you know Even the first my first podcast came out and you
know my wife lifts it listen to it and she was all stoked Because when was the last time that you sat down and talk just talk to your wife for two and a half hours, right?
Yeah, it doesn't happen And my wife was like, hey, it was awesome.
She got to know me better.
I've been married to her for 20 years.
She got to know me better because she got to sit and listen to me talk for two and a half hours.
And now she's listening to every single one of them.
And she knows she actually knows me better than she did before the podcast started.
Because I got a wife and four kids and jobs and work and travel and all that.
I don't have time to sit there and talk to my wife.
For two and a half hours.
Hey, maybe I'm a bad person, but that's just the reality of life.
Honestly, when do you ever get a chance to sit like this across from someone and talk to them for three hours without checking your phone, without anybody coming into the room, without anybody interrupting you with something you have to do or someplace you have to be?
It's very odd.
That's one of the reasons why I say that it changed my life, is because it educated me on other people's thought processes in a way that you don't get one-on-one dialogue with people in the real world.
And if you think about it, you know, as we talk about going back to these primal things, there's a primal thing about having human conversation.
And if you think about where technology is going, we don't have much human conversation.
So you're 100% right.
Not only am I not having two and a half hour conversations with my wife, I'm not having two and a half hour conversations with anybody.
Until I come up here and sit down with you or until I go into my podcast studio and I sit down and I have a two and a half hour conversation with you know a million people that are gonna sit there and listen and they're gonna give me feedback on Twitter and they're gonna tell me this and they're gonna tell me their story and it's it's very it's a we're filling a hole I think it's a hole in communication right now because you know we text each other you know you and me text each other yeah I text I text echo I text everybody text my wife I don't think you and I have ever had a conversation on the phone no I No.
And it's totally acceptable, but there's something missing.
And if we can't, you know, the next level is like, oh, we're going to roll.
You know what I mean?
Like that's the next thing is you train together, but there's...
There's a gap in human contact right now, in having conversations.
And I'm just thinking this right now, that the whole nature of podcasting fills that hole.
And if you look at the podcasts that do well, it's podcasts that are...
Conversationalist unless you go with the podcast that's highly produced and they got they you know cuz like Radiolab yeah all those ones that are highly produced and even the ones that are produced by you know NPR so they have real money behind them and they're they're a different thing But for normal dudes that are just sitting around and talking those are popular podcasts That's why Tim Sam Harris those guys are sitting around and talking and explaining stuff because that doesn't exist anymore in the in the day-to-day life for a lot of people You know what else doesn't exist in a day-to-day life?
It's like human resources and corporate life has watered down people's natural behavior to the point where people are just dying on the inside, sitting in these fucking cubicles, rotting.
Just freaking the fuck out, having all these thoughts they can't entertain, having to pretend to be someone they're not all day long, putting on this bullshit way of talking, this fake way of thinking.
Everybody's got to subscribe to whatever fucking ridiculous policies their company wants to enforce, and you're just a robot, and you get out of there and you just want to scream.
Yeah, that's another reason why I wrote the kids book, because the kids book, instead of, you know, it being about, hey, if someone's picking on you, go and tell the teacher.
It's like no actually if somebody's picking on you learn to defend yourself and kick their ass if needed that's That that hasn't been said that's another reason I wrote the book I I went I've told this story before but I went and got some book for my kid when he was little my my one son and three daughters I went and got a book from his it was like a pirate book, right?
And I'm thinking cool pirates are gonna burn stuff take over villages Steal things this will be awesome, and I read the book, and it's just complete These guys are complete You know, pathetic.
That you gotta go out and like crush some things sometimes, then we gotta just check ourselves because guess what?
Life is.
That's what life is.
That's another thing that we shield kids from these days.
Life is hard.
You don't get a trophy.
You don't get it.
There's no such thing as a trophy for participation.
That's fake.
It's a lie.
Doesn't exist you can't learn your times tables guess what you need to work and study you don't get put into a special class and get a tutor and maybe you get aid you know you got some Special help to get no you need to work and make that happen.
You don't know don't don't know how to swim guess what that doesn't mean you stay away from the water No, you learn how to swim you step up you man up.
That's what you do So that's another reason why I wrote the book so that people can actually kids can learn that Life is hard, and in order to deal with life, you gotta be hard.
Yeah, and just this idea that life is hard, something you're supposed to shield from them, it's so silly.
And, you know, I've had this conversation with my friends because everybody that I know that's interesting had a fucked up life.
But now we have kids, and the last thing we want is our kids to have a fucked up life.
So we put our kids in these good schools, we live in these nice neighborhoods, everybody eats healthy, and there's no fucking domestic violence, and everybody seems, it's so different than all of our lives.
And we were talking about it.
Me and Brian Callan were actually talking about it.
Like, we all had fucked up childhoods, and everybody we know had fucked up childhoods, and they're all interesting.
But I don't want my kids to be boring, but I also want them to be safe.
So it's like, how do you approach that?
I mean, I think you get involved.
What I've chosen to do is get my kids involved in martial arts, Give them the opportunity to pursue difficult things and understanding that through pursuing these difficult things like in accomplishing stuff Like you you learn something about yourself.
You learn that you have this ability inside of you to overcome.
I've got this Statement that I made on my podcast about kids and I said if you're helping your kids you're hurting them And if you think about it, right, and the example I gave is like tying your kid's shoe.
If you tie your kid's shoe, you're actually taking away the opportunity in their life to develop their fine motor skills of tying a shoe.
We're actually taking that away from them.
And it's the same with everything.
Make your own sandwich, make your own bed, clean your own room.
You need to do this stuff for yourself and when I'm helping you, I'm hurting you.
So I think we can protect them without just completely coddling them and making sure that every issue that ever could present itself to them has been eliminated.
Because you're going to end up with some weak kids.
Yeah, that's why some of those competitive sports are so important.
And martial arts are great, wrestling's great, jiu-jitsu, but football, basketball, anything that puts you in those challenging positions where you're going to have to step up, you're going to get ground out.
Yeah, and she is, you know, this is the same one that got stage fright.
And to see her step up and, you know, we live a pretty good life, right?
I mean, we live in Southern California.
We live in a nice house.
It's a nice living, right?
It's a very comfortable situation.
Some of the hardest times that she's been put through is on the wrestling mat and having to step up Against some girl that like the exact girl you're talking about some girl from the barrio in San Diego That's a tough ass girl that's been through the ringer and has domestic violence going on in her house And her one escape from all that is to come out and wrestle against some other girl and beat her down So, my daughter has to step up and do that, and it's an incredible thing.
It's incredibly powerful and empowering.
Even I watched her change, you know, when she would be intimidated in those situations, to where now she's like, bring it.
Well, he's dealing with a very unusual situation where those coddled, soft kids are now in universities and they're trying to run the show with these ridiculous programs of inclusion and diversity and, you know, forcing their mindset down everybody else's throat.
Yeah, it's fascinating and disturbing to see that happening and it's really yes, it's actually disturbing to see that happening and see Kids could be focused on such important things in the world and they end up focusing on something that is borderline In many cases borderline,
you know meaningless, you know launch let's let's move towards a real goal There's diseases to cure and you know yeah good things to do in the world Well, you know, I think everybody agrees that racism is bad and homophobia is bad, but that's not exactly what you're dealing with here.
What you're dealing with is people trying to control the way other people behave and talk and think, and it might not even be in response to any actual Real like Negative things that have happened.
It's like they're trying they're trying to create negative things to battle that might not even be there There's just a lot of weirdness today in this world and I think that to bring it back full circle a lot of this weirdness comes from a lack of true struggle like do you think that these kids that are growing up in Russia that are doing backflips off of the top of buildings are Are they dealing with the same diversity lectures and classes that they have to handle?
And I think there's an intrinsic part of human beings that wants to be part of a tribe of some kind and wants to defend their tribe.
And when you grow up in a place where there's no real tribe, then you look for one to latch onto.
And these people over They have a cause and they've got a tribe and you can be part of that tribe and you can be and you then you can lash out at the bad guys and I think that happens a lot and I think it's it's unfortunately unfortunate because it really Crushes, you know individuality which is what I you know That's my kind of my premier base, you know thoughts are around individual freedom.
Yeah be an individual think for yourself free your mind Yeah, there's a lot of comfort in those groups that these people belong to, whether it's any kind of group, whether it's a hardcore right-wing group or a hardcore left-wing group.
You kind of know what the rules are, and you play by those rules, and then you surround yourself with a bunch of like-minded people in an echo chamber who also support the fact that these rules are the rules, and we have to get these out there, and like...
I think we just need to establish there's a bunch of shit you shouldn't do.
Don't steal from people.
Don't rape anybody.
Don't shoot anybody.
Figure out a way that we can harmoniously get along together without fucking with each other.
And then just let everybody be whatever they are.
If you're gay, you're gay.
If you like listening to fucking classical music and running naked through the streets, I don't care.
It's hard for insecure people to allow that to happen because insecure people, when they see individual freedom that's contrary to what their own personal behavior is like, They have to question themselves and challenge themselves.
They decide that that person's wrong, and these people are wrong, and I'm right, and this needs to be established, and we need to fight, and we need to go out and punch Nazis, or whatever the fuck they think they're supposed to be doing.
Yeah, it's weird than when that becomes your whole life.
Yeah, and I'm sure you get this I get it a lot which is people on social media that want me to weigh in on this thing or they want me to weigh in on this side or they're attacking me because of this or attacking me because of that Not so much attacking but people want me to weigh in on things all the time and it's things that I just say man This isn't affecting me.
And not only that, my comments aren't gonna move this forward.
And finally, I don't care about that thing.
I understand that you're obsessed with it, but I'm not.
I'm not obsessed with this thing that you're obsessed with.
So I don't even care that you're obsessed with it.
That's cool.
And when people ask me, they say, hey, sounds good.